SourceCode: Hot New Handsets from MWC 2011

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

The annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona is the preferred event mobile device makers to launch their latest handsets and technologies and this year has yielded a staggering assortment of devices that are coming in the next few months. 2011 has been a year of alliances, spec wars and mobile gaming.

Facebook Phones emerge

The HTC Cha Cha puts Facebook in your pocket so you can chat, poke, tag and stalk your friends all the timeWith 500 million global users and growing, Facebook is the undisputed social media service today where people connect and communicate. Realizing this, HTC has launched the HTC Cha Cha and HTC  Salsa which are entry-level Android smartphones designed around the Facebook ecosystem.

HTC’s Facebook phones fill a void in the tween and teen text-focused feature phone market once dominated by the Sidekick and LG’s messaging phones.

The new phones focus on texting and typing and quick-buttons that put users in the middle of the Facebook experience where they can share, post photos, communicate with their friends and tag photos on-the-go. The fact that these phones run Android is a bonus because Facebook is clearly at the front and centre of this experience.

We're not surprised by this move, Facebook has been focusing steadily on mobile devices and a Facebook phone is the natural progression. It will be interesting to see price points on the HTC Facebook phones as well as where they are going to be sold, this could be the start of a global initiative and HTC is smart to have partnered with Facebook from the get go. 

Sony Ericsson's Big Game Play

The long awaited PlayStation Phone, now called the Xperia Play, made its big debut and also revealed a number of surprises. The device itself is about the same size as Sony's PSP Go but it sports some stunning internals. It is an Android phone (no surprise there), the underlying OS is Android 2.4 Gingerbread running on a 1 GHz ARM processor with the ability to crunch 60fps playback of these games with the built-in Andreno 205 GPU. More importantly, the Xperia Play will have a full complement of gaming buttons that slide out from the device's screen.

According to Sony the Play will have  "dedicated gaming controls for real console quality gameplay, including four-way directional keys, recognizable ABCD keys with PlayStation iconography, left/right shoulder keys, and two analog touch inputs for joystick action."

Games will be delivered through the Google's Android Marketplace, and the Experia Play will ship with Asphalt Adrenaline 6, Bruce Lee, Star Battalion, The Sims 3, and all-time favourite Tetris preloaded. Sony says, "More than 50 additional titles from top franchises at leading game publishers will be available for purchase at launch." The Experia Play will also be able to handle 3D gaming, so Nintendo's anticipated 3DS isn't the only 3D game console in town this year.

Our only concern about this exciting device right now is battery life. We have a PSP Go an even without a smartphone component, we find the 5 hour battery life on that device kind of disappointing, throw in the whole Android experience and who knows how much actual battery life you'll get.

The most exciting thing about this announcement is the availability of PSP games on Android, given the high-end specs of Android handsets going forward, this opens an avenue to serious mobile gaming on these phones specially given the large number of PSP games already exisiting. 

Android Overload

Other notable smartphone, or rather Android Smartphone releases include the razor-thin Samsung Galaxy S 2, the squarish new Galaxy is a stunner is terms of features and design. Samsung has applied their keen industrial design and engineering prowess to create this statement smartphone.

All the goodies are there, starting with the Super AMOLED  4.27-inch 800x480 screen, an 8 megapixel camera capable of 1080p video capture all ensconced in a 8.49mm thin enclosure. This is arguably the thinnest smartphone in existence today and given the specs, one of the most functional.

The Galaxy S 2, also has a new Samsung 1GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM plus 32GB of storage with microSD expansion capability.

No price or Canadian availability was disclosed but we expect to see this in various Canadian carriers in the end of Q1 2011 priced at the same range the current generation of Galaxy phones are going for right now.

Adding to the Android overload at MWC 2011, HTC dropped a trifecta of updated handsets namely the HTC Wildfire S, The HTC Incredible S and the HTC Desire S which will be shipping in Q2 to Europe and Asia.

HTC has run the gamut of devices (including a very attractive Android tablet called the Flyer), aside from the two Facebook phones discussed above, these three Android devices cover the entry-level (Wildfire), midrange (Desire S) and high-end (Incredible S). Its curious that HTC has seemingly adopted Samsung's "S" naming convention as well. There's an HTC Android smartphone for every type of user.

Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich = Confusion

Anyone in the market for an Android phone this year will have the best array of choices across the board. Hopefully al the new devices will ship with the latest Android OS for smartphones (2.4 Gingerbread) as this is all getting confusing and the whole Google dessert nomenclature is starting to get tiresome.

Not only do new Android customers need to decide on the specs, screen size, carrier and feature set, they need to delve into what OS version they are getting, if this version runs an overlay (Like Sense, TouchWiz, MotoBlur) and if it looks like their device's software will be updatable (this depends on the manufacturer as well as the mobile carrier).

Apple still has the advantage in this respect, call it a walled garden but you know all the iPhones can be updated via iTunes without carrier intervention. BlackBerry and WebOS are even better with OTA (Over The Air) updates that just appear on devices. Buying a smartphone is even more complicated than buying a PC, but at least there are a lot of good choices out there.