MWC

BARCELONA, Spain--Samsung Electronics admitted that its attempt to breach the tablet market has largely been a flop, with one executive offering a sobering summary of its performance.

"Honestly, we're not doing very well in the tablet market," Hankil Yoon, a product strategy executive for Samsung, said today during a media roundtable here.

That's about as frank a statement as it gets from any executive at the Mobile World Congress trade show this week.

That Samsung hasn't met expectations in its tablet business isn't a huge surprise; the company lags well behind Apple's iPad … Read more

Chinese electronics company Huawei just made bold claims at MWC when its chairman, Richard Yu, said the Ascend D Quad is the world's fastest phone. Naming another milestone, Huawei has announced plans for the first 10-inch tablet powered by a quad-core processor.

Called the MediaPad10 FHD, the slate uses a similar 1.5GHz K3 CPU Huawei expects to place in the Ascend D Quad. Another alluring attribute you'll find in the MediaPad FHD is a 10-inch IPS LCD screen with a supersharp resolution of 1,920x1,200 pixels. Dolby Surround Sound audio processing will be onboard as well, along with an 8-megapixel main camera and 1.3-megapixel front-facing shooter.

Of course I thought the first 10-inch quad-core tablet was the Asus Transformer Prime. Truth be told, that's a 10.1-inch quad-core tablet, so perhaps Huawei is really splitting hairs here. … Read more

BARCELONA--Facebook would like to build more mobile Web apps and fewer mobile native apps. Really, it would -- but browsers just aren't up to it, the company has concluded.

Web apps naturally span the multitudes of mobile devices that Facebook loves to run on, but they support Web standards so inconsistently that it's a developer's nightmare, said Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor, speaking here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. So Facebook is trying to do something about it: "We're taking on mobile web standards," Taylor said.

It's a two-pronged effort. … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Wireless operators need to stop locking devices and offering overly complicated data plans. That's the message from Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn and eBay CEO John Donahoe here at Mobile World Congress.

Dunn and Donahoe took the stage today as part of a panel discussion about mobile payments. While the CEOs talked a lot about how shopping and payments are changing thanks to mobile devices, they also took a few jabs at wireless operators, challenging them to become more open to help spur greater adoption of their services across a broad range of devices.

While the mobile phone … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Telefonica today showed off B2G, the Mozilla browser-based operating system for mobile phones, saying it's good enough to sell to today's feature-phone customers later this year.

You may or may not agree. To help you judge, here's a video of Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, demonstrating a prototype phone at a press conference today at the Mobile World Congress show here. At the event, Telefonica announced its mobile OS pact with Mozilla.

Having watched the demo myself, the phone looked workable but awfully pokey. And touch input-- specially the keyboard--was … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--The momentum for Android continues to build, with 850,000 phones and tablets getting activated each day.

That's according to Google Android chief Andy Rubin, who unveiled the statistic on his Google+ page today. Like most other major wireless players, he was in attendance at Mobile World Congress, the world's largest wireless trade show.

"Walking around Mobile World Congress and seeing the Android ecosystem at work is quite impressive," Rubin said.

He also dished on a few other impressive stats, including the activation of 300 million Android phones in total so far and the arrival … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Asus struck a high note when it introduced the one-of-a-kind Transformer Prime last year, but that device was only the beginning.

Today at Mobile World Congress, Asus finally released its long-awaited Padfone. Though the device first made an appearance last May in a promotional video, sightings of the actual device have been rare. And after skipping an official unveiling at CES last month, speculation mounted that Asus would use Barcelona as the stage instead.

At its most basic level, the Padfone is a candy bar Android smartphone with high-end, though hardly revolutionary, specs. You'll find a 4.3-inch … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain - A year into its partnership with Microsoft, Nokia is filling out its Windows Phone smartphone portfolio and differentiating devices with Nokia-only features and apps.

On Monday, Nokia kicked off the Mobile World Congress tradeshow here with a new low-end Lumia Windows Phone smartphone, the Lumia 610. This is now the fourth Lumia Windows Phone in the portfolio, and it will sell for 189 euros ($254) in Europe before subsidies.

Microsoft announced the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 in October. These were the first Windows Phone devices for Nokia, and they were initially only available in Europe. Now, … Read more

BARCELONA--Half of Telefonica's customers are in Latin America, where smartphones are scarcer than in wealthier parts of the world. But the mobile network operator hopes Mozilla's new browser-based operating system, B2G, will change that.

"What we're selling the most in these countries is feature phones, which is ridiculous, said Carlos Domingo, Telefonica Digital's director of product development and innovation, in an interview at the Mobile World Congress show here in Barcelona, Spain. "We think we can bring smartphones to the masses in developing countries with this approach."

How affordable, exactly? The B2G phone … Read more