MWC day two: a new hope

If day one of MWC was dominated by Windows Mobile, day two went to Android -- although most of the announcements were vague and Toshiba's Snapdragon-based TG01 did much to impress. Obviously the big announcement was the HTC Magic (née the G2), which'll be coming to Vodafone UK in April, but several other manufacturers committed to building Googlephones as well. What else did we learn?

• We went hands-on with the Magic and Android's Cupcake update and found it to be pretty great, although the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack and US 3G bands didn't exactly pull at our heartstrings.

• The Toshiba TG01 got our blood racing, though -- the stripes interface is actually super-slick on the huge screen, and Snapdragon's fast as hell.

• ATT Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said Dell's building a smartphone. Then he took it back.

• We got to play with a few Tegra prototypes, one of which was running Android and the other doing 1080p video. It was all very impressive, but we didn't see any working phones with the chipset, and that's the only way into our jaded hearts.

• The GSM Association decided to standardize on microUSB chargers and set a target date of 2012 for it to happen. They could have been 90% there if they'd just gone with miniUSB. Sigh.

• Samsung will be building "more than three" Android phones in 2009, as well as a LiMo Foundation Linux phone. Of course, this is also what Sammy said last year at MWC, and with no hardware to show, it's just vapor for now.

• Acer wrote us a secret Android love note with a promise of two phones this year. We checked "maybe" when they asked us if we liked them.

• We also checked out Acer's boring Tempo WinMo 6.1 phones that look like they're running Microsoft Bob and its maybe not-so-boring other phones that weren't powered on.

• LG promised an Android set by June (we're guessing the KS360) with at least two more by the end of the year. We also learned that Orange customers will be the first unfortunate lucky enough to buy the G910 Watch Phone and spent some time with the S60-based KT770.

• We got to play with the OmniaHD's 720p video camera. There were some framerate issues, but if they get sorted out by launch like we hope this thing'll be a beast.

• We also spent some time with the other big S60 launch at MWC, the Nokia N86 -- it has an amazing OLED screen and solid camera, but the form factor is wearing thin, and that T9 keypad just isn't enough.

• Everyone's getting in on the WinMo skinning game, including Gigabyte, whose Smart Zone interface on the S1200 wasn't half-bad.

• Hyundai decided that the next step in phone form factors are the watch, the pocket calculator, and the 4G iPod. Note to Apple fanboys: aren't you happy all those mockups were just that?

Yep, those are the bigs -- check out our full MWC 2009 coverage for all everything else that went down. Overall, today seemed to be distinctly more Android-focused, but we're dismayed at the lack of actual devices shown running Google's OS -- mostly we just got a lot of nonspecific promises. We'll see if we can squeeze some dates and specs from people tomorrow, keep it locked!

P.S.- Remember, if you're not loving all the MWC news, there's a special RSS feed just for you. Seriously though -- this stuff is pretty sweet.