Every year in February, Barcelona becomes the playing field of not just its iconic football club but also of several mobile phone companies that converge on the Spanish city for one of the biggest tech events of the world, the Mobile World Congress (MWC). For these few days, the city is the world’s unofficial mobile capital, with brands vying with each other to showcase their best and brightest products and ideas. MWC 2024 was no different, with dozens of products, services and concepts being unveiled in Barcelona.
When the dust had settled, these were the products that stood out from the latest tech rain in Spain:
Lenovo ThinkBook Transparent: A See-Through Notebook
The most spectacular product seen this year in Barcelona was not a mobile phone. It was something that actually might never hit the market, but it was so cool that folks were lining up to see it. This was Lenovo’s ThinkBook Transparent Notebook.
It is pretty much your standard notebook, except that its 17.3-inch microLED display is quite transparent. The display is transparent when the pixels are turned off and becomes opaque when you switch them on. That’s not all, the ‘keyboard’ of the notebook is also a touch surface that you can sketch and write on if need be. It is super cool, but what is the utility?
Well, rather limited, to be honest (why would we generally like to look at the world through a notebook display?), although you can literally look at something in front of you and sketch it, and when in transparent mode, the notebook can identify objects that you can see through that display.
The display is also only 720p in resolution, a far cry from the super-high resolutions you see on many notebooks. Lenovo has no plans of making this product commercially yet, but it certainly has a wow factor to it, although, at the time of writing, it is more about style than substance.
Motorola Rollable Concept Phone: The Rollable That Rocked MWC
One of the most photographed devices at MWC this year was a phone that you could wrap around your wrist. It came from Motorola, which rather elaborately referred to it as the ‘rollable concept phone.’ In its normal shape, it looks like your run-of-the-mill candybar Android phone with a touchscreen.
Pick it up and you will notice that it has a fabric back. And that is because it is bendable. You can bend its lower part backwards to make a stand for itself or just wrap it around your wrist (you would need a magnetic band) and see it become a rather wide smartwatch.
This is a completely rollable phone and unlike foldables, it has no creases in it. Motorola has used multiple batteries in the phone to ensure that the phone can bend smoothly. Not much was revealed about its hardware and the phone remains entirely a concept at the time of writing. We do hope it comes off the drawing board.
Xiaomi 14 Ultra: Leica Inside
There was no doubting what the most talked about phone in Barcelona was — it was Xiaomi’s extremely camera-centric Xiaomi 14 Ultra.
Like its predecessor, this one too came with dollops of photography goodness from none other than the legendary Leica of Germany. The phone sports the large circular camera unit on the back that seems to be the rage these days, and within it are four 50-megapixel cameras with Leica flavouring, spearheaded by a one-inch sensor with an aperture that can be adjusted between f/1.63 and f/4.0, and backed by two telephoto sensors and one ultrawide. It is not just about the numbers, though.
There are same very innovative Leica shooting modes and filters onboard, and there is even a Camera Kit, which includes a grip that adds a zoom lever, a two-stage shutter button, and also can act as a 1500 mAh power bank.
There is some staggeringly good hardware accompanying those shooters too — a 6.73-inch quad-HD+ LTPO AMOLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor with plenty of RAM and storage, and a 5,000mAh battery with support for 90W wired and 50W wireless charging.
At GBP 849 (which converts to over $1,000), it does not come cheap but it definitely has what it takes to take on and break the iPhone/ Galaxy S Ultra/ Pixel hegemony in phone photography.
Honor Magic 6 Pro: The Eyes Have It
Honor has been making its way back to the smartphone spotlight ever since it parted ways with Huawei a few years ago, and its Magic 6 Pro certainly turned heads in Barcelona.
The phone is one of the first to come with what Honor terms a silicon carbon battery, which not only is less prone to heating as compared to traditional Lithium Ion batteries but is also more eco-friendly.
But what caught the eye (pun intended) was the phone’s eye-tracking interface that lets you interact with apps through the movements of your eyes. The wizardry happens courtesy of the front-facing camera and a lot of AI which works out where you are looking and carries out associated commands.
Honor showed the feature being used to control a car, providing the show with one of its most memorable moments.
There’s a lot of flagship-level hardware in there with a triple camera comprising a 50-megapixel main sensor, a 50-megapixel ultrawide sensor, a massive 180-megapixel telephoto sensor, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, with a brilliant 6.78-inch AMOLED display.
A spherical camera unit placed inside a square-ish box on the back gives the phone a very distinct look, but it is not the only eye-catcher in this flagship, which retails at GBP 1,099. No, we do not know if and when it will come to our shores.
OnePlus Watch 2: Watch Out, OnePlus Is Back
OnePlus had been relatively quiet in the watch space after its high-profile OnePlus Watch a few years ago, but MWC 2024 saw it return to the premium smartwatch space with the OnePlus Watch 2.
And in the best OnePlus tradition, the OnePlus Watch 2 came with features that grabbed attention. The watch has two processors and two operating systems — Google’s WearOS4 handles more complex app-related tasks, while an RTOS (similar to that seen on the OG OnePlus Watch).
The idea behind this is to ensure that the smartwatch gets the best of both worlds – the speed and long battery life of RTOS and the smartness of WearOS. OnePlus claims that this enables the watch to have a battery life of 100 hours, which is staggering by WearOS standards. It also comes with 32 GB of storage and GPS, as well as heart rate and blood oxygen sensors.
It comes with a very classic analogue watch design with a sapphire crystal cover and a stainless steel chassis and has IP68 dust and water resistance. At Rs 24,999, it is more expensive than its predecessor but that dual OS setup and battery life could make it challenge the Apple-Samsung hegemony in the premium smartwatch zone.
Samsung Galaxy Ring: Finally, The World Got To See It
Samsung announced its Galaxy Ring wearable at the launch of the Galaxy S24 series in January, but in Barcelona, many people actually got to see it and some even used it for a short while. And while not too many details were released about it, the buzz around the ring was massive.
Samsung showed the Galaxy Ring in Barcelona in three colours (gold, silver and ceramic black) and nine size variants from 5 to 13. Although no exact details were given (we still do not know about battery life and notification handling, for instance), Samsung told some of the media that it would come with support for women’s cycle tracking and also feature a new health metric that Samsung calls My Vitality Score, based on sleep, activity, heart rate variability and resting heart rate.
There was also talk of integrating it with Samsung’s extensive ecosystem in general and in particular with the Galaxy S24 series and the Galaxy Watch 6, and of course, Galaxy AI will be involved in it in a big way.
ZTE Nubia Flip: Pocket-Friendly Flippable
One of the biggest challenges confronting foldables is the fact that most of them come with very high price tags. ZTE is looking to change that with its Nubia Flip. At its starting price of $599, it is easily one of the most affordable flip phones in the market.
And while it does not boast flagship specs (it runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 chip), it comes with a colourful, sleek design that is likely to appeal to many users with a 1.43-inch external display and a 6.9-inch internal OLED display.
Dual 50-megapixel cameras handle the main photographic tasks, while a 16-megapixel camera handles selfies from the internal display. Also on board is a 4310 mAh battery with support for 33W charging. ZTE is positioning the Nubia Flip as a portable, stylish alternative for the younger audience.
Whether that success or not only time will tell, but as of now, we are flipping for that price.