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Mobile World Congress in 14 lines
In Barcelona we all tried to thrive And strove to not imbibe too many beers When Samsung trotted out the GS5 Then shortly after highlighted new Gears. Mozilla's and Ubuntu's phones seemed cheap, Along with some of Waterloo's new wares, But Sony's flagship stuff's atop the heap And Blackphone puts an end to snooping scares. Though what of HTC and LG, too? Those also-rans with rivals large and strong? They talked of their Desires and G Pro 2 While we were wond'ring if Nokia's wrong. It wasn't long before the show had ended And we'll be back next year, our livers mended. (image credit: Getty Images)
Mobile World Congress 2014 report card: who made the grade?
Now that Mobile World Congress is behind us and we've left the sunny Mediterranean to go back to our rainy or snowy abodes, it's time to reflect on the show that was. We walked through miles and miles of hallways and battled thousands of roller bags and suits to find the show's best and worst. There were Nokia phones running Android, 7-inch phones, new wearables with curved displays and even a couple connected toothbrushes. We also saw zero Windows Phones, very little Tizen and a whole lot of Firefox OS. You'll be able to find the fruits of our labor through our Events page, but we wanted to take a quick look back at some of the biggest companies that we covered throughout the past week. How well did they do at the most important smartphone show in the world? Who was the big winner of MWC, and how good was the show itself? We've put together a report card that discusses the overall performance of each major company, so read on to get our take on the week that was.
Samsung's new Gear watches are now open to third-party support
Among the many frustrations we had with Samsung's first smartwatch, the Galaxy Gear, was the limited number of apps available for it. While the company offered premium access to select partners, it never came out with a software development kit (SDK) for anyone and everyone to submit their own app. When the Gear 2 was announced earlier this week, Samsung also promised that it would deliver an SDK for its latest series of wearables. At the company's developer keynote at MWC this morning, that's finally changed -- Samsung has announced the "immediate availability" of kits for the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and Gear Fit, as well as another SDK for S-Health. There's a bit of a difference between the Gear and the Gear Fit kits, however. The Tizen-based Gear SDK will make it possible for developers to create applications that run on both Gear 2 watches (using both Android apps and web apps), while the Gear Fit version offers an emulator and the ability to control the device from an Android app. We'll continue to update you as we get more information at this morning's keynote. Update: we're not seeing the kits live on the site quite just yet, but Samsung just stated that it'll be available today.
BlackBerry currently has no plans for a wearable device
Wearable devices seem to be a hot trend in the wireless industry right now, but BlackBerry isn't taking the bait... at least, not yet. When asked about his company's plans at Mobile World Congress, CEO John Chen was very straightforward in confessing that he has no current plans for bringing a wearable device to market. That doesn't mean it won't happen down the road at some point, of course, but it's clear that this particular market segment isn't really an area of interest or focus right now -- considering the company is working hard to bring out fresh devices and is in the midst of getting back to becoming profitable, and it appears that BlackBerry doesn't believe that such a device would really make a dent in its bottom line yet.
