Every year, the world’s biggest smartphone manufacturers (apart from Apple) descend on Barcelona to announce their shiny new phones at Mobile World Congress.
The event officially runs from Feb. 26 to March 1, but many of the biggest announcements took place in press conferences on February 25.
On Sunday, Samsung announced the Galaxy S9 and S9+, Nokia unveiled a whole plethora of devices, new and old, and Huawei eschewed phones altogether, choosing instead to announce its latest laptop, the MateBook X Pro.
Samsung struggled to keep a lid on leaks this year, so the announcement of the S9 and S9+ did not contain too many details that had not already been let slip. The biggest change from previous models is a redesigned camera.
Sony only released the Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 Compact six months ago, but it is already back with an updated version of both of these devices – the Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact. Both devices have been given a complete design overhaul.
Rather than unveiling a new flagship device, LG opted to use MWC to reveal a couple of underwhelming updates to its six-month-old V30. The new device, the LG V30S, has two extra gigs of RAM (making it 6GB in total) and twice as much storage as the previous model (256 GB).
There were no phone updates from HTC, but the company unveiled its first chip to enable mobile devices to access 5G internet speeds and revealed plans to launch a 5G smartphone in the second half of the year.
The chipset is called the Huawei Balong 5G01. The Chinese technology giant claims that it is the world’s first commercial chipset that meets 5G standards.
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