AT THE four-day Mobile World Congress in Barcelona manufacturers and service providers showcased the best and latest gadgets to a global audience. Here is some of what was creating a buzz at the show.
Tablets
This will be the year of the tablet, if the congress is anything to go by. From Samsung and HTC to ViewSonic and Acer, tablets were the big news of MWC.
Many of them – the Galaxy Tab, the HTC Flyer and Motorola Xoom – run on Android. The Flyer is stylus-enabled, allowing you to take notes on it and HP’s offering, the TouchPad, uses its own WebOS, developed by Palm.
The ViewSonic ViewPad10 offers a dual OS, running both Windows and Android. BlackBerry is planning to offer two new Playbooks, one that will utilise 4G and LTE, and another that will use HSPA+.
Apple will face plenty of competition to its iPad 2, which has yet to be officially announced.
The size of the different devices varied by inches. While Samsung increased the Tab to 10.1 inches, as the name implies, the Optimus Pad from LG settled at 8.9 inches, allowing it to be big enough to be viewed comfortably, but not so big that it cannot be held in one hand. The HTC Flyer, meanwhile, stayed at the more compact 7 inches.
Sony Ericsson Play
The PlayStation phone has been rumoured for some time and Sony last week confirmed the existence of the Xperia Play, promising to show it off at the congress. The device is styled like a PSP, with touchpads where the joysticks usually would be.
It runs on Gingerbread, fitting in with Sony’s intentions to introduce the PlayStation Suite that will bring PS games to Android phones. The 4-inch screen is multi-touch. The phone also comes with a 5.1 megapixel camera built in, in addition to the usual phone features – Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, headphone jack.
LG Optimus 3D
You may not need 3D on your phone, but there may come a time when you will want it. The LG Optimus 3D doesn’t require the use of any special glasses to view its 3D content and you can even create your own with dual cameras to capture both still and video 3D images.
You can play it back on the 4.3-inch WVGA display or upload it to YouTube, thanks to a deal that LG has made with the video- sharing channel.
The Optimus 3D runs on Android 2.2 initially and will be upgraded to Gingerbread.
SnapKeys
If you could get rid of the on-screen keyboard for your mobile device, it would free up a lot of space. SnapKeys tries to do just that. The virtual keyboard allows you to blind type on a virtually invisible keyboard at the edge of the screen. Four keys correspond to six or seven letters each, with additional keys for numbers and punctuation.
The system uses predictive text to guess the word you are typing, with SnapKeys claiming 92 per cent accuracy for beginners and up to 99 per cent for advanced users.
The 100,000-word English dictionary can be corrected as you use it too, increasing the accuracy level.
