mwc2012

Despite the aura of doom and gloom surrounding Research In Motion, the company demonstrated an amazing concept app at Mobile World Congress 2012 that could make you a believer again.

Confetti, a colorful collaboration app for PlayBook tablets, aims to make meetings more lively by adding a little flair to file and image sharing. The setup creates a virtual space for PlayBook tablets, and a demo shows that an optional cheap QVGA Webcam allows you to position PlayBooks in multiple configurations (like in a circle or together in a cluster) for enhanced interactivity. File sharing appears simple, as you can flick content from one device to another over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--It may be early days yet, but I'm really liking what I'm seeing so far of the Asus Padfone and Padfone Station. Or, as I like to call it, the turducken of mobile devices.

The Padfone essentially mashes up the concept of the Asus Transformer Prime tablet with its docking station, and the concept of the phone-in-empty-laptop-dock (like the Motorola Atrix 4G and laptop dock) to create a zany triple-play that has you snapping your shiny Padfone into a tablet shell to get a slate, then sliding the phone-powered slate into a docking station for a keyboard (… Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--We now know the two Android phones on which Panasonic is pinning its hopes for a successful re-entry into the world market for mobile phones.

The good news: they're both sleek, waterproof designs with buttons tucked into the back. The bad news: they're named "Eluga."

Maybe the name test-marketed better in Europe and Japan, where the phones will arrive first, but to me it sounds like a big, homely fish. In any event, they'll be carrying the weight of Panasonic's attempt to reach beyond the Japanese mobile phone market into which the company … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G: try saying it five times fast. Or better yet, just call it the "Blaze" like I do, and appreciate the simple pleasures of what is by today's standards your regular upper-mid smartphone.

T-Mobile and Samsung first announced the Blaze 4G at an intimate press gathering at CES; in fact, it was one of the last of the new handsets to be revealed. The unveiling was part of a larger speech delivered by T-Mobile USA CEO Philipp Humm promising that despite the proposed merger with AT&T going belly-up, T-Mobile would fight to regain relevance and 4G network spectrum--an ambition that spells out L-T-E.… Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--The first and second days of Mobile World Congress certainly flew by in a whirlwind of smartphone product announcements.

While the torrent of press conferences and gadget news abated a bit, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt notably took the stage at MWC. Schmidt rallied the Android troops touting the exponential growth of the mobile OS while calling for less censorship and increased access to high-tech services saying, "Technology is a leveler. The weak will be made strong, and those with nothing will have something."

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When Nokia announced the 41-megapixel 808 PureView smartphone at MWC 2012, CNET's associate editor Lynn La said "it is a phone that has so many megapixels, its megapixels have megapixels." That, it turns out, was a pretty accurate statement.

But, before I get into what that all means, judging by comments I've read there seems to be some confusion about the largeness of the sensor. The 808's image sensor is not only larger in resolution, but physical size. It's larger than the ones in most--if not all--current smartphones as well as the majority of point-and-shoots.

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BARCELONA, Spain--Technology is going to make it harder to be a repressive dictator, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt believes, but censorship could still create a "digital caste system" that will mean some people remain laggards in the global economy.

Information inevitably will leak like water out of areas where censorship prevails, he said in a speech at the Mobile World Congress show here. And mesh networks--peer-to-peer connections linking mobile phones to each other without central Internet access points--will make that information leak even faster.

"In times of war and suffering, it will be impossible to ignore the [… Read more

Cotton candy isn't just a sugary treat anymore; it's also a computer in a USB thumbdrive-sized package.

FXI Technologies' ARM-powered computer-in-a-stick, Cotton Candy, was on show at MWC, where the company announced that it is taking preorders for this tiny device.

We first saw this little computer last year when it was revealed to have an ARM Cortex-A9 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, a Mali 400 GPU for high-definition video decoding, and support for both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

One end of the device plugs into a USB port for power while the other end connects to a … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--You would think Michael Abbott, who runs a joint venture aimed at deploying mobile-payment services across the nation, would want to take a shot at Google and the early stumbles it's had with its rival digital wallet.

You'd be wrong.

"I applaud Google for addressing the problem quickly," Abbott said in an interview with CNET today. "It's best for the industry if we move on."

Isis, a joint venture backed by AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile USA, has taken a slow, methodical, and some would argue frustrating, path toward deploying … Read more