Mobile World Congress 2012 is probably going to see more announcements compared to CES 2012. Of course there will be the expected announcements from both the smartphone and tablet makers; but we expect to see more of the players that represent the underlying technology behind such devices. These are the top 3 trends we're expecting to see:
1. Processor/chip makers will be showing off their goods. We're not just
talking about the big boys like Qualcomm and Nvidia. We're also talking
about the relatively smaller players like Marvell and MediaTek.
The spotlight for this category however will be on Nvidia - we hope to see
more Tegra 3 powered devices at MWC 2012. We're talking about quad-core
devices which are also very capable of running intense games. We had a
review unit of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime earlier and it was
impressive; so to see this play out in more devices will be interesting
indeed. We'll definitely try our best to have a look at the Nvidia booth
when we get to MWC in Barcelona.
PC chip maker Intel will also be something on out watch out list. Intel
Medfield debuted at CES 2012 with the Lemovo K800 smartphone and the Lenovo
IdeaTab K2110, an Android tablet.
2. Ice Cream Sandwich will be in more devices besides the new Samsung Galaxy
Nexus and the Transformer Prime we've seen here in Malaysia. We're
definitely expecting more devices at MWC to be running on this latest
Android 4.0 operating system. We're talking about appearances in the
majority of devices - so if they don't come with Ice Cream Sandwich, they'll
come with a promise of an update.It would be extremely disappointing if we
don't see the expected slew of such devices at MWC 2012.
3. 7-inchers will be more mainstream. The way things are, with players such
as Samsung churning every possible size in the guise of tablets or so called
Note-sized devices, we're expecting to see a lot of smaller than 10-inch
tablets. The 7-inch will be the size that will suddenly appeal to more
people as they discover that they need one still, after they've bought the
heavy-to-read-in-bed 10-incher they got last year. We're talking about high
performance and high end versions - the 7-inch size is no longer the domain
for budget or cheap tablets running Android 2.3. Yes Ice Cream Sandwich will
also be on this space.
