Gallery: Gallery: Tablets Dominate Mobile World Congress
Charlie Sorrel01mobile-world-congress-2011
It's shaping up to be the Year of Too Many Tablets. Like this year’s CES, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was all about the tablets. Android tablets ruled the show, for the most part, but the BlackBerry PlayBook and HP’s hot webOS-based TouchPad also made appearances. But mixed into the tablet hype was the usual blend of weird products, mindless marketing, blue sky and gushing fountains and — of course — booth babes. Go grab yourself a *café cortado* or a cool glass of *horchata* and enjoy our picks of MWC 2011.
Charlie Sorrel02samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1
The hidden shame of Samsung’s ten-inch Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the back. While the hi-res screen is gorgeous, and takes up the entire front of the device, on the back you get lightweight plastic. It feels good and strong, but it also feels very cheap.
Charlie Sorrel03viewsonic-viewpad-10
ViewSonic’s ViewPad 10 tablet dual-boots into both Android and Windows 7, and does neither very well. The combination of the ancient Android 1.6 and modern but touch-unfriendly Windows makes for a compromise that only an easily pleased cubicle-jockey could love. And that’s before we even get to the battery-sucking, heat-emitting Atom CPU.
Charlie Sorrel04viewsonic-viewpad-10-rear
The back of the ViewSonic ViewPad 10, complete with air-vents and license stickers. It's just like a laptop -- minus the keyboard.
Charlie Sorrel05motorola-xoom
Motorola's Xoom, one of the first Android Honeycomb tablets, had the suits at the show impressed. But almost everyone I asked cracked up about the expected price-tag, which is either $800 or $1,200, depending on which leaked Best Buy ad you believe. The saving feature? A pretty decent 5MP camera.
Charlie Sorrel06motorola-xoom-flash
The Motorola Xoom even has a flash to go with the rear-facing camera. It may look absurd to be snapping pictures with such a big device, but don't knock a 10-inch viewfinder until you've tried it. After all, it worked for Ansel Adams.
Charlie Sorrel07android-mascot
This little fella, the Android mascot, was everywhere at Mobile World Congress. That's no surprise given the huge number of Android-based phones and tablets hitting the market this year. Here he is giving away candy at the Motorola booth, but the promiscuous little robot was seen hanging around with with anyone and everyone. He was even seen lying flat on his back (in the form of big floor stickers).
Charlie Sorrel08lg-touchwood
If you can get past the pun-tastic name, then LG’s Touchwood is a cute enough phone. Made from surplus wood from Japan’s overgrown forests, the bean-shaped handset packs a 5MP camera, 3.4-inch screen and almost nothing else.
Charlie Sorrel09lg-touchwood-front
Here’s the business end of the LG Touchwood. It’s no smartphone, but as feature phones go, it’s certainly a looker.
Charlie Sorrel10lg-optimus-3d-cameras
LG’s Optimus 3-D cellphone comes with a pair of 5-megapixel cameras to snap stereoscopic video and stills. We just have one question: when you switch to 2-D, which camera stays on, and which one is switched off?
Charlie Sorrel11lg-3-d-touch-screen
LG can always be relied upon to bring something completely whacked-out to the Mobile World Congress, and this year the company didn’t disappoint. The LG 3-D Touch-Screen combines a lenticular display with magnets to provide tactile feedback. Your stylus contains one magnet, and a big electromagnet sits in the box below the screen. In the demo, this lizard shoots out his tongue. At the same time, the electromagnet fires and the stylus is almost jerked from your hand. The effect is surprisingly convincing.
Charlie Sorrel12samsung-booth
This year Samsung’s booth seemed to have grown as much as the others have shrunk. The Korean company had the biggest presence at the show with the exception of Alcatel Lucent, which greedily took over a whole building.
Charlie Sorrel13giant-phone
No Mobile World Congress would be complete without a giant phone on display. This one belongs to LG, and it even shifts from portrait to landscape orientations.
Charlie Sorrel14intel-chips
This display, from Intel, shows what your cellphone and computer chips look like before they get chopped up by pixies with tiny saws and soldered onto logic-boards by Santa's elves (what did you think they did in the off-season?).
Charlie Sorrel15hp-touchpad
Nobody was allowed to touch the HP TouchPad, but the live demos of the company's webOS-based tablet showed it to be the most exciting one at the show. Fast, responsive and with some clever tricks, it seems to be way ahead of Android’s Honeycomb already. The TouchPad even knows which dock you have placed it in and can show Facebook photos at home and a stock ticker at work, for example.
Charlie Sorrel16hp-touchpad-keyboard
The HP TouchPad has a workable keyboard that includes a number key row on the main screen. (No need to switch screens just to enter a few digits.)
Charlie Sorrel17hp-touchpad-cards
The HP TouchPad's card-based interface lets you switch back and forth between different applications. It'll be familiar to anyone who has seen the webOS interface on its smaller, older siblings, the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi.
Charlie Sorrel18blackberry-playbook
I got a little hands-on time with the BlackBerry PlayBook, shown here running the Kobo e-reader app (which will come pre-installed on the device). Scrolling felt a little jittery, but in terms of size it might be just the ticket for the businessman on the go. It’s still prerelease, so we’ll have to wait and see if the sluggish U.I. is the result of beta hardware or the use of Adobe Air and Flash.
Charlie Sorrel19android-crashes
Sure, I may have a little bias towards the iPad, but this is why: Android tablets crash, and when they do, it's *ugly*.
Charlie Sorrel20taxi
Mobile World Congress wasn’t as busy this year as it has been in recent years, but that doesn’t stop the taxis flocking to take advantage of all the expense-account spendthrifts in attendance.
Charlie Sorrel21opera-on-the-ipad
It will be submitted to the App Store “when it’s done,” the makers says, but even in its present form, Opera for the iPad is a fast and well-designed browser. It still suffers from the fate of all iOS alternative browsers, though: None of them can be set as the tablet's default browser.
Charlie Sorrel22opera-on-the-galaxy-tab
Opera running on the Galaxy Tab is much like iPad version, only smaller. Thanks to Android's flexibility, this one does have the option to become your default browser.
Charlie Sorrel23booth-babes
Cboss is the big daddy of booth-babes. Nobody knows or cares what the company makes, but every hour these poor girls are forced to dance while somebody makes a presentation about network technologies (or something). And without fail, hordes of lecherous suits line up with their cameras. The irony is that every single one of these men has a smartphone with 3G access, giving them access to all the booty-waggling videos they might want at any time.
Charlie Sorrel24buzzword-bingo
Holistic Bandwidth Technologies. What does that even *mean*?
Charlie Sorrel25sonims-indestructible-phone
Sonim’s "indestructible" phone has a feature-set that would make a 1990 Nokia look fancy, but it’s not there to update your Facebook profile. It’s there to survive. Here it is encased in carbonite (actually, concrete), but it could also be seen surviving a dunking in anti-freeze at -25ºC (-13ºF), remaining scratch-free after a stressed-out exec beat its screen against this very concrete block, and generally being abused.
Charlie Sorrel26sony-ericsson-xperia-play
Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play, aka the PlayStation phone, was one of the hits of the show. You immediately forget you’re playing on a cellphone and just enjoy the games. Unless you’re me, of course, in which case you will suffer defeat after humiliating defeat.
Charlie Sorrel27sony-ericsson-xperia-arc-2
It's not new at the show, but the elegant Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc sure is photogenic. Here it is on the cusp of disappearing into an infinite regress.
Charlie Sorrel28the-facebook-phone
HTC's long-rumored Facebook phone is finally here. Kinda. The HTC handset is still in beta, and the Facebook integration consists of a single “f” button grafted onto the case. Press it and you are taken to the Facebook website. That’s it. Yawn.
