Counting The Chickens...?

As a bellwether for mobile trends to come in the year ahead, MWC Barcelona (formerly Mobile World Congress) has come a long way since its early days, where meetings were often convened in yachts on the French Riviera than the sprawling current day Fira de Barcelona exhibition grounds. As I went ringside this year to check out all the action, I joined nearly 1 lakh-plus attendees to seek answers for the next big things in consumer tech and debunk some of the hype as I went along.

The conversations this year were dominated by two major themes: 5G and folding phones. 5G was everywhere at MWC with the leading players offering their opinion on how the next generation in wireless mobile tech, with its faster speeds and higher bandwidth, will change consumers’ lives.

The GSMA, the body which runs MWC, is of the belief that we will approach 1.4 billion 5G connections by 2025, with global internet of things connections will tripling to 25 billion by the same time, so the need to migrate to the latest greatest tech is here and now. Yet, for all the buzzwords being bandied about – “Fastest”, “Innovation”, “Tomorrow” – no one could explain exactly when and how 5G is going to play out in a city near you. Worse still, there is the economics of 5G to consider as well – with RoI on 4G hovering in the single digits for many carriers, there is simply no evidence that all the connected robots, multiplayer games and AR/VR apps will lead to a boost in the bottom line of the carriers.

Whether the carriers are ready or not, Qualcomm stole the show by getting a bunch of hardware partners to launch 5G devices at the show - for their part, Samsung had their S10 5G on display, Xiaomi showed off a 5G version of last year’s slick slider Mi Mix 3 smartphone and LG, ZTE and Huawei showed off their 5G handsets as well. It is quite the engineering feat to get these many handsets to market this quick, even before the networks are deployed.

Then there were the foldable phones – phones that bend and fold out into a bigger tablet form factor – a solution (in its current form, at least) to a problem no one has. Huawei unveiled its Mate X at MWC, while Samsung showed off its Galaxy Fold, both secured safely behind glass cases out of reach for us to use and try out. Royole was the only brand with something that one could touch and see – the FlexPai - and the experience was…rough and unfinished, not to mention extremely bulky. Walk around and you could see more concepts and prototypes floating around, all with strong statements of intent but most lacking a market date.

Much like CES, MWC is slowly becoming a hotbed for “what’s next” with answering the “how and when”, to the point where it feels like if one company steps up to the plate to announce something new, everyone else is ready to announce their own version, even if it’s nowhere near ready. Makes it downright impossible to predict what’s actually going to make it to consumers’ hands this year, which defeats the purpose of the conference in the first place!