Category: Mobile

The Lumia 520 is Nokia’s new entry level Windows Phone device — costing around $180 before taxes, a far cry from the flagship Lumia 920 and 820 currently up for grabs in the US. The 520 is confirmed for the U.S. market with T-Mobile due to range it in Q2. So what do you get for not-too-many dollars? Besides the latest version of Windows Phone (WP8), Nokia has included a few perks for budget buyers, including its HERE mapping and navigation software, its Mix Radio free streaming music service and its digital lenses camera filters and Cinemagraph animated GIF creator.

Also on board: Nokia’s glove-friendly sensitive touchscreen tech — so the 520 can be poked with a fingernail or prodded with a glove. But of course, this is still a budget device — so it’s more compact in size than the higher end Lumias, with a 4 inch display. It also lacks 4G, NFC and wireless charging. There’s no compass on board either so the 520 doesn’t get to tap into Nokia’s augmented reality City Lens app.

Design wise, as you’d expect, the 520 is certainly the least premium looking of the range — lacking any fancy touches, such as the layered colour-on-colour casing flourish Nokia added to its previous entry level Lumia (the 620). That’s not to say it’s unattractive. To my eye ‘cheap and cheerful’ is a fair description, while its fairly steeply curving sides give it a more angular look than the rest of the range.

The 520 shares the Lumia’s plastic unibody design but unlike the flagship Lumia 920 and 820 it’s a less premium feeling material, with a matte finish. The advantage of this cheaper plastic and smaller size is it feels much lighter of course. Thickness is just under 1cm. The brighter Lumia colours — red, yellow and white — are available as swappable shells sold separately, with cyan and the less stand out black option being the standard retail options.

The screen has a resolution of 800 x 480 — aka the old Windows Phone 7 resolution. It looked bright and clear during a brief hands on but less contrasty than the Lumia 720 (which includes Nokia’s Clear Black display tech). Under the hood the 520 has a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon chip — giving it the same amount of power as the former entry level Lumia 620. It handled the Windows Phone UI well, feeling fast and responsive during my encounter with it.

On the back there’s a five megapixel lens, which supports 720p HD video recording. While more expensive Lumias have had lots of tender loving care lavished on their camera kit, the 520 sits in Nokia’s unbranded camera category, so set your expectations accordingly. Nokia has included some of the features offered at higher Lumia price-points, including its Smart Shoot feature and the ability to capture wide angle shots but there’s no front facing lens.

Windows Phone 8 is an increasingly attractive OS at these budget price points — where Android hardware can be woefully underpowered. The easy to use Live Tiles interface, embedded Facebook et al social networking and value-add extras (such as 7GB of free SkyDrive cloud storage from Microsoft — and free streaming music from Nokia) compare well against a swathe of budget Androids. While WinPho is still certainly constrained when it comes to choice of apps, here at the low end smartphone price point that’s not such a huge minus. What the OS lacks in apps it makes up for with its polished look and feel — and, in the 520′s case, enough power under the hood to keep the basics feeling slick.

Samsung (005930) has set up a very ambitious goal for itself: It wants to become the Android vendor that corporate America can trust. At Mobile World Congress on Monday, Samsung announced it was further bolstering its mobile enterprise credentials by releasing KNOX, a comprehensive package of mobile security services that will be integrated into its SAFE (Samsung for Enterprise) brand. Among KNOX’s many features are an application container that works similarly to the BlackBerry (BBRY) Balance feature that separates work application data from personal application data; the ability to implement separate VPNs to individual applications rather than relying on one VPN for the entire device; and a security-enhanced version of Android that’s been customized to help IT departments enforce more than 300 IT policies and have access to more than 700 mobile device management APIs.

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Nokia is taking one more step to push its mapping and devices services as a standalone business. Today, the company announced during the handset maker’s press conference at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it would be rebranding all of its Nokia-branded mapping and navigation services as “HERE” going forward.

The Here suite comes pre-installed on the Lumia 520 and includes HERE Maps, HERE Drive and HERE Transit — a public transport guide “that you can use even in unfamiliar surroundings” Nokia’s design chief Marko Ahtisaari said today. You can pin your home location on it as well — and use that as the base for all the data. “These personal experiences are meant to help you spend more time engaging in the world around you rather than navigating your smartphone,” he said.

Elop noted that Nokia will begin integrating the Here suite into non-Nokia phones later this year to help enhance the data. “The growing scale of the platform is beginning to be recognized by more and more partners,” said Elop at the press conference. Those include Amazon and (of course) its OS partner Microsoft.

The company is also adding more functionality and integration into HERE, by integrating it with Sight — an augmented reality service that lets you take pictures of places to help you initiate maps and navigation functionalities. “We want to bring Sight and Location to more and more applications,” he noted.

And it also introduced a wireless charging holster that can be used in cars — which again link up with the car navigation’s capabilities. Nokia has been moving closer to in-car navigation services, with its most recent deal with Toyota Motors in Europe to embed the technology in its connected cars.

The rebranding move is a sign of how Nokia continues to keep advancing its mapping business as a standalone effort, and as a revenue stream that may grow through partnerships with others, while it continues to exist as a suite of services for Nokia devices themselves. It could also be a sign that so far that effort has not had as much traction as Nokia would have hoped — perhaps because of the association with Nokia.

Yesterday, Nokia was revealed as one of the launch app makers for the Firefox OS platform. Mozilla and its partners are taking a route (a gamble, some might argue) not focused on native apps but HTML5-based web apps to fill out content for the new smartphone platform.

This also follows along with Nokia’s intention, when it first launched the HERE brand for maps last year, to make the service available via APIs both for other Windows Phone handset makers as well as developers on Android and other platforms. It’s part of how Nokia is also trying to open up more and more of its APIs to developers.

In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO of Nokia Stephen Elop noted the importance of Nokia’s navigation and mapping efforts and how it’s part of Nokia stepping back from being a strong brand in all cases — quite a seachange for the company.

“Instead of hearing us talk about Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive, you’ll here us talking about HERE Maps and HERE Drive but we’ll also be talking about those capabilities, or some of those capabilities being taken across a broader collection of Windows Phone devices, beyond Nokia devices,” he said.

Still, Nokia’s mapping and navigation unit has for a while been a small sibling compared to its bigger (if challenged) handset and hardware business. Although full-year results saw the division raising sales by 5% in the last year, it declined by 9% to €278 million in Q4, whereas handsets devices brought in 3.8 billion in the same quarter.

Nokia has just announced two new Lumia smartphones at its Mobile World Congress press conference – broadening its Windows Phone 8 portfolio to five devices and filling in some of the pricing gaps in the mid and lower end of the range. The two 3G newcomers to the Lumia line are the Lumia 720, which slots into the portfolio just above the Lumia 620, and a new entry level handset, the Lumia 520, which pushes the price of Nokia’s Window Phone 8 devices to a new low of €139 ($180) before taxes, down from its previous low of $249.

CEO Stephen Elop described the new more populous Lumia line up as “the most innovative portfolio of devices in the world” — reappropriating the tagline the company uses for its Lumia 920 flagship to underline how some of the features found on its flagships are trickling down to more affordable devices, including its ”super sensitive” touchscreen technology which allows users to interact with the screen using a fingernail or when wearing gloves, and its digital lenses image filters and its Cinemagraph animated GIF creator.

“What we’re doing with this Mobile World Congress in many respects is taking some of the great innovation you’ve seen in flagship products like the Lumia 920 and we’re broadening that down through the portfolio,” said Elop. ”We’re now at a point where you’re seeing an organisation which has undergone a great deal of restructuring and changes but now you’re seeing the full power and might of Nokia being applied to the broadest range of portfolio for the Lumia products.”

Nokia Lumia 520

Nokia’s previous entry level Lumia, the 620, was announced last December but still hasn’t launched in the U.S. — however Nokia confirmed today that its new entry level Windows Phone will be coming to North America, with T-Mobile US set to range the Lumia 520 (pictured below) in Q2.

The Lumia 520 has a 4 inch LCD display with a resolution of 800 x 480. Under the hood the handset is powered by a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon chip, along with 512MB of RAM. Internal storage is 8GB but there’s a Micro SD card slot to expand memory up to 64GB (not counting the 7GB of free cloud storage that comes with Microsoft’s SkyDrive service). The device also includes a 5 megapixel rear camera, plus the swappable shells featured on the Lumia 820 and 620 — in the same range of distinctive and bright Lumia colours.

Nokia Lumia 720

The new mid-range Lumia 720 (pictured below), priced at around €249 ($330), is initially targeting the Asia Pacific market — with China Mobile confirmed to range it in Q2. It’s unclear whether it will come to the U.S. later — Nokia said it has nothing to announce at this point. China Mobile will also range the 520.

The dual-core 1GHz Lumia 720 has a 4.3 inch Clear Black display, for improved viewing outdoors, with the same screen resolution as the Lumia 520. Memory and storage are also the same. Nokia described the handest as the “trendiest Lumia in product family” — talking up its sleek, rounded looks, including curved edges to the screen and a 9mm waist, which makes it the thinnest Lumia in the range. This handset is being targeted specifically at “younger, trendier, hyper social users”.

Aside from the device’s look and feel, the camera is the big focus with the 720 — thanks to its target audience’s love of social networking and photo sharing. Although the 720 is not PureView branded, it has a 6.7 megapixel rear lens, with Carl Zeiss optics (and branding) and an f1.9 aperture to allow in lots of light to boost low light photography performance. The front-facing lens has not been forgotten either — it’s a 1.3 megapixel HD wide angle lens, which allows for up to three people to squeeze into a shot so someone can take a self portrait with two friends.

Nokia has also added a new Lumia digital lens — called ‘Glam Me Up’ — which lets 720 users snap an enhanced self portrait using the front facing lens, which then auto processes their photo to make it look more polished, giving them whiter teeth and smoother skin. The company said this feature had played very well with its target market of appearance-conscious consumers.

Going Lower, Not Higher

Despite rumours of a true PureView Windows Phone, Nokia had no high end Lumias to unbox at its MWC press event today (nor was there any sign of Windows tablet hardware). Its focus this year is evidently on bulking out and expanding the competitiveness of its mid range offerings — in both Windows Phone and Series 40 products — to firefight the spread of affordable Androids, and presumably also to try to head off the threat from other low cost newcomers such as the nascent Firefox OS.

Driving Windows Phone to lower price points is a strategy Nokia CEO Stephen Elop discussed last month, during Nokia’s Q4 results, when he noted: “We are clearly innovating with Microsoft around Windows Phone, and are focused on taking that to lower and lower price points. You will see that over time compete with Android.”

Nokia has unwrapped a new handset — not a fancy smartphone but a budget feature phone: the Nokia 301 (pictured left) is an $85 mobile that doesn’t have a touchscreen or a Qwerty keyboard but does pack HSPA (aka 3.5G) and includes some enhanced camera features, as well as supporting YouTube streaming video via Nokia’s cloud Xpress browser for the first time.

Right now Nokia is holding its Mobile World Congress press conference where CEO Stephen Elop and his team are banging the drum for a newly expanded line of Lumia Windows Phone smartphones. But Nokia’s mobile strategy is two-pronged: with Windows Phone at the higher end and its own Series 40 OS powering a broad swathe of basic and budget devices, such as the 301. The thing is, right now, Nokia simply can’t afford to ignore the low end. Here, far from the glamour of Lumia smartphones, is where Nokia’s volumes are.

For all its marketing efforts to push Windows Phone, Microsoft-powered handsets still only account for a fraction of Nokia’s device sales. In its Q4 the company shipped just 4.4 million Lumias vs 79.6 million mobile phones — mostly S40 based, as Symbian limps to its end.

A Feature Phone With Some Smart Extras

At $85 the Nokia 301 sits at a price-point Windows Phone hasn’t dipped down to yet, although Elop has said Nokia is “innovating” with Microsoft to drag Windows Phone “to lower and lower price points” (case in point: it just unveiled a new entry level Lumia, costing circa $185 — the Lumia 520). In the meantime, Nokia is doing itself what Microsoft’s OS can’t: powering phones that are priced to fight super budget Androids. In November it was the launch of a $62 Nokia Asha Qwerty device with a Facebook button. Today it’s a brightly coloured feature phone with some smarter than average camera features. Nokia needs to keep budget buyers away from Android’s low end — which sets consumers on an upgrade path to higher end Android smartphones — if it is to stand a chance of convincing them to upgrade to Windows Phone-based Lumia phones later on. 

While the 301 doesn’t have the touchscreen smarts of a budget droid — or even Nokia’s Asha full-touch devices (the cheapest of which is priced at $99)  – Nokia has beefed up the device’s camera capabilities, adding some quasi-smartphone features, including a panorama mode, which lets users take up to four separate shots and stitch them together; a sequential shooting mode that allows for up to five photos to be taken continuously; a filter application to apply a choice of five camera effects to shots; and a neat voice-guided self portrait mode to help users align their image in the frame when snapping a photo of themselves. Hold the phone up in this mode and it will bark LEFT! UP! DOWN! RIGHT! and so on until your face is in the right position for your close up. Photos can also be shared straight from the gallery to social networks like Facebook (or to other phones via Nokia’s Slam Bluetooth sharing tech).

Nokia is also consciously styling its budget devices like its smartphones — dressing them in the Lumia range of distinctive colours (cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white in the 301′s case) — as well as borrowing other Lumia design touches, such as the metal camera plate on the rear to draw attention to the 301′s 3.2 megapixel lens (as seen below).

“For the first time now you’re seeing from Nokia, one single portfolio. One single industrial design language that’s coming through from the Lumia 920 smartphone, all the way down to products like the 305,” said Neil Broadley, Director, Technology Marketing, of Nokia’s Mobile Phones division, showing off Nokia’s latest addition to the bottom wedge of its handset portfolio.

As well as fancy casing colours and camera tricks, the 301 comes preloaded with apps including Facebook, Twitter and eBuddy. Additional apps can be downloaded from the Nokia Store, although when you’re fighting the might of Google Play it pays not to focus too much on apps. Instead, Nokia is trying to stand out through hardware design and camera innovation: so it’s borrowing some of its Windows Phone strategy here too.

It remains to be seen whether bright colours, some camera tricks and a few key social networking apps are enough to convince the masses of cash-conscious buyers to choose Nokia feature’s phone over a budget Android. But Nokia also points to the thrifty nature of its cloud browser, which compresses webpages before delivering them to eke out more data, and long battery life (up to 39 days on standby in the 301′s case) as other areas where it’s looking out for the cash-conscious mobile consumer.

The Nokia 301 will go on sale “during Q2 this year”, and will be available in single and dual SIM versions. Nokia said it will be offered in multiple markets globally (but not currently the U.S. market), rather than being targeted solely on emerging markets — launching in more than 120 countries, in “Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, India, Middle East and Latin America”.

New Entry Level Phone: The Nokia 105

For the very cash-strapped phone buyer, Nokia has also today refreshed its rock-bottom entry-level device. The Nokia 105 (pictured below, right) is the successor to the Nokia 1280, and has a price-tag of just $20. The biggest update, beyond the design refresh, is the screen — which is no longer monochrome but colour. The handset’s design has also been spiced up, with a single piece keymat and a couple of Lumia-esque casing colours: cyan or black. The device includes Nokia LIfe: its SMS-based subscription information service — but is clearly not going to get developers too excited. This phone really is a phone — in the traditional voice and text sense of the word. 

Small and feature-lite though it undoubtedly is, the 105′s predecessor, the Nokia 1280 (which launched back in November 2009) has now sold more than 100 million units globally, Nokia said today. So small and low priced continues to do the volume heavy-lifting for Nokia, even as its top end Lumias struggle to make an impression against Android and iOS.

The Nokia 105 will start rolling out in Q1, with the initial target markets being “China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia, Vietnam and other markets in Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East”.

 

Apple hasn’t done much to change the way iOS works at its core, in terms of navigating within and between apps and the home screen. In fact, iOS is maybe the mobile OS that has remained the most fundamentally the same since its introduction, at least among those that are still in active use. But while Apple hasn’t been making huge changes to the basic iOS user interface, third-party developers have been pushing the boundaries and creating great examples of how things could be better for a next-generation version of Apple’s mobile OS.

The requirements for capturing attention in the App Store have changed dramatically over the last few years. When Apple’s mobile software store was new, just releasing an app at all could nab headlines and significant download numbers. But now it takes something special, especially when you’re building an app whose job is already adequately handled by countless competitors with existing apps.

That special ingredient lately has come in the form of innovative new methods for user interaction. Designs that do away with buttons, standard user interface elements suggested by Apple and built into the iOS development SDK, mean taking risks since you’re asking customers to start in unfamiliar territory, but in the base cases, they also result in a kind of new life for your iOS device.

Gestures are where it’s at for a lot of the newest apps out there. Gestures handle everything from data entry, to deleting and adding new items, to switching views and updating information. Apps like to-do list Clear began to expand the concept of what developers could do with touch-based interfaces, and lately others have taken up the case and pushed the boundaries even further.

Now there’s a whole cadre of apps that are doing similar things, including two featured this week by Apple: budget management app Bdgt and weather app Haze. Weather apps seem particularly ripe for this kind of change in design, with Solar also offering a similar experience. But no category seems likely to be left untouched: Mailbox uses a lot of gesture navigation not seen elsewhere for its inbox management commands, and Rise is a new alarm for iOS that hides virtually every control interface, relying entirely on finger swipes and drags and eschewing anything resembling a button.

Some of the interaction methods introduced in these apps are so intuitive you find yourself trying to use them throughout iOS and in other apps. For example, swiping left and right to access settings or preferences, or swiping down and up to switch views and access additional info. The good news is Apple need only pay close attention to what these third-party devs are doing to start charting a path to fresh new interface design for iOS. It’s beyond time the mobile OS got a significant, modern upgrade, and there are plenty of developers out there who are already helping that happen.

Flash back a month or so to CES — NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang officially pulled back the curtain on the company’s new Tegra 4 chipset, and called it the “world’s fastest mobile processor.” It was a hell of a claim to make, but the company did little to justify it at the time aside from pointing to its array of Cortex A15 CPU cores and its “72 GPU cores.”

Fortunately, NVIDIA is much chattier here at MWC, and was eager to show off some rather impressive synthetic benchmarks for its latest and greatest mobile chipset.

Well, maybe “eager” isn’t exactly the right word — NVIDIA really hates playing the mobile benchmark game. I don’t blame them. In many ways the sorts of numbers that these tests spit out just don’t accurately reflect the experience that users will actually have. During our early testing for instance, the Nexus 4 consistently put up some strangely anemic Quadrant scores — which its cousin the Optimus G handily blew past — despite working like a dream.

All that said, benchmarks are largely are for the most part inescapable, and the Tegra 4 SoC does a rather nice job on them anyway. Quadrant is one of our go-to mobile benchmarking tools, and the Tegra 4 did not disappoint — it scored in the mid-16,000s, topping out at 16,591. To put that in a little perspective, Samsung/Google’s Nexus 10 (which itself is powered by a relatively new dual-core 1.7 GHz Samsung Exynos chipset) usually scores in the mid-to-high 4,000s. Asus’ Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 (powered by a 1.6GHz quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3) fared about the same, if not a hair higher.

The results were much the same when we looked at AnTuTu scores — while tablets like the Nexus 10 and Asus’ TF700 will yield scores in the mid-8000s to low-9000s, the Tegra 4 demo tablet consistently hit scores above 36,000.

Curious about how the Tegra 4 compares in your preferred benchmarking suite? You can see the full gallery of Tegra 4 benchmark results below:

One of NVIDIA’s most prominent competitors these days is Qualcomm, and NVIDIA Product Marketing director Matt Wuebbling was eager to chat about the performance differential when I let slip the Q word.

When asked about how much NVIDIA knows about Qualcomm’s updated Snapdragon chipsets, he replied simply enough: “we know a lot.” By his count, the Tegra 4 is about two to three times faster than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 (used in devices like the new HTC One). He went on to say that the top-tier Snapdragon 800 is about 25 to 35 percent faster than the 600, with the implication that the Tegra 4 still comes out on top.

Though his response has based on Qualcomm’s published Snapdragon claims, I’d still advise you to take that comparison with a grain of salt. That’s nothing against Wuebbling, but these sorts of simple comparisons don’t always paint the most accurate picture. I couldn’t reach Qualcomm for response at time of writing, but I’ll update if/when they respond to these claims.

You would think that this sort of horsepower would suck a battery dry in jiffy, but that doesn’t appear to the be the case. Another Tegra 4 demo had a video running at full resolution on a small 1080p display, an exercise that never drew more 1 watt of electricity at the most. Power consumption typically fell within the 900-950 milliwatt range — devices like the Droid DNA for instance tend to draw around 1.2 watts for similar tasks.

The Galaxy Note 8.0 — the newest device in Samsung’s many-sized range of tablets, unveiled today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona — has just managed to trump Apple’s iPad Mini in the small tablet category with one-tenth of an inch more of screen space (more on the device in our hands-on). At the same time, Samsung is also introducing a few new services and features — including expanded hovering capabilities and more apps, which it hopes will also help it gain more consumer ground against the world’s biggest tablet maker. The extra features show that Samsung sees improved services and content this as key to improving its market share in the tablet space.

Don’t touch, just hover

Samsung’s S Pen stylus has been upgraded to work both on the touchscreen of the Note 8.0 as well as with the physical navigation buttons, and Samsung is also extending the functionality of the pen in other ways. And the Air View feature, where users can initiate previews by hovering their pen over something without touching the screen, is now getting expanded to third party apps. The first of these is a new version of the Flipboard social newsreading app, where users can select and expand a tile by hovering the pen over a selection.

Yes, you can argue that this is more of a gimmick than a useful element at this point: why, exactly, do you need to hover the pen over the over a tile when it’s just as easy to tap and select? And isn’t the point of the touchscreens that you can “touch” them? But I can also see how this could become more useful as the feature develops and gets used elsewhere. For example, one of the annoying issues with touchscreens are accidental clicks, such as those made on ads when you are trying to navigate around an app.

Companies like Google are introducing ways of reducing accidental clicks; others are even playing around with the touchscreen to de-sensitize them for those with less precise fingers. But the hovering pen — whose pin of light needs to rest for a brief moment to select an item — could be another way to select what you want to see and do.

In addition to the Flipboard app, the hovering already works with file folders, email, gallery views of photos and videos, a spokesperson notes, and it will also work with more apps in the future, as developers upgrade them to recognize and respond to the S Pen’s proximity to the screen.

New apps, and new features in older apps

With the Note 8.0, Samsung is also ushering in a couple of new developments on the apps front, in addition to the new version of Flipboard.

In keeping with Samsung’s original vision of the Note acting as a kind of organizer and productivity device — more screen than a phone for planning; but smaller than a tablet to make it portable — Samsung has scooped an exclusive on a new Android app launch. Awesome Note, a note-taking that lets you track progress and make lists across different categories, has up to now only been available for iOS devices, where the full edition of the app for iPad retails at $4.99.

Now developers Bird are releasing an Android version, and while this will also be sold as a paid app in the Google Play store, Samsung will be bundling it as a free app on the Note 8.0 “for at least a year,” according to Michael Lin, marketing manager, Samsung Electronics.

Other apps that will be preloaded on the device include the newest version (2.0) of Chat-On, Samsung’s cross-platform, cross-media group and direct messaging service; Reading Mode that modifies the screen brightness for reading; and Smart Remote, Samsung’s universal remote control and electronic program guide, playing into the fact that nowadays a lot of consumers (80% in the U.S., claims Samsung) use a second device like a tablet while watching TV.

Talk to me, but not everywhere

The camera features, as Chris pointed out, are not brilliant on the Note 8.0 — and so we may not see too many people doing this with them:

Nor, it seems, will we see many people in some parts of the world using the Note 8.0 to do this:

Although the Galaxy Note 8.0 is incorporating, as Lin says, “all of the capabilities of a smartphone into a tablet,” the phone feature will be disabled on the device when it launches in the U.S., both in the initial WiFi version as well as in the 3G/LTE versions. Whether this is because carriers have asked Samsung to remove this to keep the device from cannibalizing handset sales, or whether it’s because of consumer taste, or for another reason entirely, is not clear.

It’s a pity, because while you may not want always to talk on your tablet, it can come in useful as an occasional phone, both for video and voice calls. Our test of the phone found the voice quality decent.

The voice calling feature will be included in the device when it launches in other parts of the world, Samsung says.

Nortre Dame cathedral photo: Tumblr

It’s that time of year again — mobile nerds and enthusiasts of all stripes have begun to descend upon Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, and naturally a TechCrunch contingent has set up camp in Spain to cover it all.

Or, we’ll try anyway. MWC is a behemoth of a show, packed to the brim with enough phones, tablets, and apps that it’s enough to make even the more ardent mobile nerd’s heart go a-twitter. To say that we’ve got a busy week planned is quite an understatement, but here’s a brief look at some of the players that are in attendance and what (we think) they’re bringing to the table.

First, there are the earlybirds — the companies that wanted to get some of their big news out ahead of the show in order to avoid drowning in a sea of press releases. HTC will be around as it always is for instance, but it’s already made its big reveal during a pair of simultaneous events in New York and London. Personally, I’m hoping that an HTC Mini is floating around the show floor somewhere so I can finally try and figure out why it exists.

And then there’s Sony, who managed over the past few weeks to make some waves with its Xperia Z and Xperia Tablet Z. So far the company has done well to avoid raising any eyebrows in advance of its press event on Monday, but that hasn’t stopped the rumor mill from churning — Sony may announce that it’s bringing that Tablet Z to the UK (and hopefully beyond).

Those of you expecting a glimpse at a brand new flagship phone from Samsung will probably come away disappointed this week — the Korean consumer electronics titan seems to have stopped using MWC as a launchpad for its top-tier smartphones. The big Samsung announcement expected this week is that of the Galaxy Note 8.0, the S Pen-friendly tablet whose existence has been leaked so often that even HTC would blush. The latest? Slashgear obtained this image (above) taken at the Fira Gran Via earlier today, confirming that the GalNote 8.0 would indeed take the stage here in Barcelona.

Samsung may not be planning to show off too much in the way of high-end phone hardware, but eternal rival LG seems more than eager to fill in. Sure, its big ol’ Optimus G Pro may have already enjoyed its share of the spotlight, but I’m looking forward to some hands-on time with it. Also on deck are LG’s mid-range Optimus F series handsets — the F5 features a 4.3-inch qHD display and a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, while the F7 bumps things up slightly with a 4.7-inch 720p IPS screen and 1.5GHz dual-core processor. Maybe not the most exciting things in the world, but probably a damned sight better than last year’s Optimus Vu .

Meanwhile, as rumors of a super-svelte Catwalk Windows Phone continue to make the rounds, Nokia is seemingly gearing up to unveil a pair of new Lumias this week. A handful of recent leaks pointed to the existence of the Lumia 520 (left) and 720 (right), and now a set of leaked images from none other than EvLeaks (who, in case you were curious, has a rather solid track record with these sorts of things) have added even more fuel to the fire.

Nokia’s wallet-friendly device portfolio has also been pegged to grow this week with multiple new, non-Windows Phone handsets. Apparently, it’s all part of a plan to shore up the company’s presence in developing markets, which jibes rather nicely with the previously-stated goal of connecting “the next billion people.”

China’s ZTE has been awfully transparent about its plans this year — you can expect to see the company’s hefty Grand Memo (complete with 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro and 5.7-inch display), as well as one of the world’s first honest-to-goodness Firefox OS phones. Not exactly a shock considering that Firefox OS is being geared heavily toward making a splash in developing markets, but it’ll be neat to see what sort of hardware ZTE cooked up to match Mozilla’s web-centric OS. There’s even a spec sheet floating around now, thanks to some Engadget tipsters who managed to get into the MWC venue a little early:

Speaking of Chinese OEMs, Huawei has been keeping its cards close to its chest so far. It’s pretty obvious that the mid-range Ascend P2 and its 720p screen will be making an appearance very shortly, but the question is whether or not it’ll be alone — after all, Huawei did reveal two heavy-hitters during CES. There’s little doubt in my mind that Huawei knows how to make a good phone, but another question to mull over is whether or not this year will be the one that sees Huawei finally fit into the mainstream.

Sadly, this year attendees will have to do without the frozen treats and the scores of Android pins that Google brought to the show last time around. While the company hasn’t officially stated why it downsized its presence on the floor this year, we’ve got our own theories. In a slightly related vein, Motorola Mobility has never really had a big presence at MWC, so odds of a big X-Phone announcement are pretty much nil — sorry folks, better luck at I/O.

There have been persistent rumors that Asus intends to reveal its third-generation Padfone at MWC, which seem to have been corroborated by a recent (and incredibly corny) teaser video that pointed to a moment when “Pad and Phone come together” to form a “metallic miracle.” It would be a peculiar move given how long the older models have been around. The original Padfone is less than a year old for one, and the Padfone 2 was only released a few months ago. Subsequent teasers point out that whatever Asus plans to show off is Intel-powered too, so that strange FonePad is starting to look like a lock.

This may seem like a lot, but trust me — this is just a fraction of what Mobile World Congress has to offer. Be sure to keep up on all the latest news out of Barcelona by checking out our full event coverage here — the fun kicks off in earnest tomorrow.

Yes, you can fix that smashed iPhone on demand now. That means no visits to the Apple store, or intensive DIY efforts.

A YC alum called iCracked launched a real-time, iPhone or iPad repair service a little over a month ago.

Think of it like an “Exec” or an “Uber” for your broken iPhone that you can order straight to your door.

With hardly any publicity at all, the service is blowing up: it boosted iCracked’s number of monthly customers by about 250 percent and the company tells me the business is eyeing “eight figures” in revenue for this year. The changes add iCracked to a growing class of startups like Exec, Uber, Zimride’s Lyft, Instacart and Postmates that are all trying to solve the logistical issues of delivering products and services in real-time in urban cities.

“We want to be the ‘AAA’ for your device,” explains AJ Forsythe, the company’s CEO. “We’re doing on-demand repair and buyback for just about every major city in the U.S.”

He shared some of the maps above and below with us, showing actual completed repairs in the last 30 days. Above is the San Francisco Bay Area, and just for good measure to show that this isn’t a Silicon Valley-only phenomenon, he showed us a map of South Florida (below).

“We’re trying to get to a place where we can get someone to them in the shortest amount of time at the click of a button,” he said. He partnered with a 20-year-old from the U.K. named Martin Amps, who had built a dispatch system just months ago. Amps never implemented it because it was so specialized, but Forsythe found him on a Hacker News posting and thought the system could be of use to iCracked.

Up until then, iCracked’s three-prong business model worked similarly. But it didn’t operate in real-time. Customers would have to mail-in their devices or schedule appointments with iTechs.

iCracked earns revenue in three ways: it does 1) repairs, 2) buybacks and 3) sells do-it-yourself kits (pictured right) for people who want to fix phones themselves.

The company has more than 350 “iTechnicians,” who work as contractors and are trained to quickly fix broken iPhones and iPads. They earn decent salaries of between $70,000 and $100,000 a year. Forsythe says he’s selective and he only ends up hiring about 2 to 3 percent of iTech applicants.

While these “iTechs” aren’t full employees of the startup, iCracked earns revenue by selling them parts and connecting them with customers. Depending on whether it’s an iPhone, iPad or iPad and the kind of problem a customer has — whether that’s a screen or battery replacement or water damage — costs hover around $75 to 99. But an iPad LCD replacement can top $200 with the mail-in service.  If you don’t spring for Apple Care, iCracked beats the cost of paying for an entirely new device or spending more than $200 on a replacement phone.

The “iTechs” make up about 50 percent of iCracked’s revenues, while 30 percent comes from the DIY kits and the remaining 20 percent comes from buybacks, where the company will pay to take old, unused iPhones or iPods off people.

The new real-time dispatch service will also change the buyback program. Before, iPhone owners would have to mail in their devices, get an appraisal seven to 10 days later and then get a check in the mail after that.

Eventually, iCracked will be able to send out an iTech immediately, who will estimate the value of the device, and then give the customer a prepaid debit card for that amount on the spot, which can be redeemed at any local ATM.

This complex, real-time dispatch system is a far cry from where iCracked started. It’s one of those humble “dorm room” businesses that emerged out of Forsythe’s time as an undergrad at Cal Poly-SLO. He gained a reputation on campus as someone who could quickly fix iPhones on the cheap. He then turned it into a business, and started charging people at school $75 per fix.

Eventually, he started scaling up iCracked by finding makers of inexpensive screens and then hiring and training other people to repair devices. After that, he joined Y Combinator’s winter class of startups last year.

The business has some angel investment, but Forsythe says he’s shied away from doing a full Series A round. They’re starting to look for additional growth capital now, however.

“We have this thing called — ‘hardware,’” he joked, poking fun at how venture investors seem to favor software startups.

After unboxing a pair of phablets at CES, Chinese mobile maker Huawei looks to be lining up a new flagship smartphone in its Android-based Ascend P line ahead of the Mobile World Congress trade show kicking off in Barcelona Monday. The company, which pushed into third place in the global smartphone rankings for the first time in Q4, has sent out invites to a press conference taking place tomorrow afternoon (CET).

It’s not confirmed what device or devices Huawei plans to unveil tomorrow — the invite includes the cryptic tagline “Discover possible” – but CNET‘s Stephen Shankland has snapped a photo of Huawei’s MWC booth, currently under construction before the crowds arrive on Monday, which includes a sign for an as yet unreleased device called the Ascend P2.

Judging by the name, the Ascend P2 is the sequel to the Ascend P1, which launched in Europe last summer. P stands for ‘Platinum’ in Huawei’s marketing speak — one rung down from its top-of-the-line D for Diamond devices, such as the 5-inch Ascend D2, which it outted at CES, along with the 6.1 inch Ascend Mate (its Galaxy Note rival). Those quad-core whoppers leave room in Huawei’s portfolio for a powerhouse smartphone with a slightly less palm-stretching screen. So, enter stage left the Ascend P2. Either that or it has a typo in its booth signage.

Aside from an LTE variant, the Ascend P1 was a relatively mid-range affair — with a dual-core 1.5Ghz chip, 4.3-inch display and 8 megapixel camera. The Ascend P2 is rumoured to add more beef the second time around, with various leaks hinting at a 1.8GHz quad-core chipset — which would give it more welly than either the Ascend Mate or the D2 — along with a 4.7 inch display, a 13 megapixel camera and Android 4.1. We’ll find out for sure tomorrow.

Huawei can’t claim to have the massive brand clout of Samsung and its Galaxy range, but its mobile profile is growing and it has carved out a savvy niche for itself in the Android space by offering relatively impressive specs for the device’s price point — which, in its Ascend G range, has helped to power up the functionality of budget Androids. The company is also taking a similar tack with Windows Phone — showing off an “entry level” Windows 8 device at CES, the Ascend W1, and partnering with Microsoft to launch an “affordable” Windows Phone device for the African market.

Even though Sprint (S) could soon have a commanding advantage over its rivals in terms of spectrum holdings, CEO Dan Hesse still isn’t satisfied. Bloomberg reports that Hesse and Sprint are still plotting ways grab more spectrum even if the company succeeds in fully purchasing Clearwire and boosting its total mobile data spectrum portfolio to an industry-leading 184MHz.

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Google has released video from a recent webinar about brand building in a multiscreen world. The video is about a half hour long, and discusses ways to build brand awareness and influence consideration for your brand using YouTube, the Google Display Network, and the Google Mobile Network.

South Africa has been one of BlackBerry’s (BBRY) key markets globally and the Canadian vendor has held more than 50% of the smartphone market there for years. As the BlackBerry Z10 now rolls out in South Africa, the country will be a key testing ground for a potentially controversial development. Local mobile operators will no longer offer unlimited BlackBerry Messenger service after May 31st, just three months after the Z10 debuts in South Africa.

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The number of gadget-related thefts in major metropolitan areas has only continued to rise, and the number of resolved cases simply can’t keep up. However, it would appear that Apple is now working directly with the NYPD to help return iThings into the hands of their rightful owners.

The NYPD has formed an official team which will work directly with Apple to track down stolen iThings, mostly iPhones and iPads.

Devices are tracked in the same way they always have been: with the help of tracking number (International Mobile Station Equipment Identity). Once the tracking number has been relayed to Apple, Cupertino can locate the device and send police to retrieve it.

According to NYPD spokesman Paul Browne, the team hopes to uncover a pattern that will lead police closer to the more organized side of the thefts, involving resale on the black market to unsuspecting buyers.

In New York, 74 percent of all stolen Apple products remain within the five boroughs. But some venture quite a ways away — the NY Post reports that Apple helped police track down an iPad that had ended up in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

According to the Huffington Post, the NYPD reported that over 40 percent of all robberies in the city now involve cell phones.

The wireless industry has been working hard to integrate with law enforcement on a number of levels. Along with Apple’s direct work with the NYPD, the wireless industry as a whole has been working to form a database of tracking numbers to help keep theft down, or at the very least, return as many stolen devices as possible. However, that won’t launch until November of 2013.

Additionally, carriers are working with officials to developer a next-generation 911 system that includes texting, MMS, as well as calls.

A lot of talk about Apple (AAPL) releasing a cheaper version of the iPhone has revolved around whether the company will be able to maintain its traditionally high margins and brand integrity while delving into the mid-tier device market. But per Business Insider, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty has issued a new note with some new insights following a one-on-one meeting she had recently with Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer.

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Google seems to be looking to bring its ambitious Google Glass wearable computer to market much faster than many likely anticipated, according to the Verge. Google told the site that it hopes to have a “fully-polished” version of Glass available for sale to ordinary consumers by the end of 2013. The cost will be under the $1,500 Google was asking for developer-targeted editions of the headsets put up for pre-order first at Google I/O, and then again earlier this week.

This is the most clear Google has been yet about its public release schedule for the headset-mounted computing device. The company had previously been reported to be targeting a year-end 2013 consumer release, with a price point around that of current smartphones, according to a report from last February by the New York Times’ Nick Bilton. Then in June 2012, Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggested that a rough timeline for developer and consumer availability would put the device in the hands of the general public in 2014.

This time, a Google official has said directly that the company is targeting an end-of-year release date, so there’s little room for different interpretations there, and the credibility of the source isn’t up for debate. Google’s recent release to a broader audience beyond just developers via an application process indicates things might be moving quicker than the company previously expected.

The Verge also got some extended hands-on time with Glass, and notes that it is compatible with iPhone devices as well as Android handsets. They also came away convinced that this is something that Google will eventually be able to turn into a device with mass-market appeal, whether or not it’s quite at that stage by the time it hopefully hits shelves later this year.

Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone isn’t just the best-selling smartphone in the world, it’s also the most reliable. A new study conducted by the company behind the community based trouble-shooting resource FixYa on Friday issued its latest smartphone reliability study. The study used data from 722,558 combined problem reports combined with market share data from StatCounter to assign a reliability score to leading smartphone vendor. Apple was found to be the most reliable handset maker with a score of 3.47, nearly 300% better than smartphone shipment volume leader Samsung (005930), which got a score of 1.21.

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Samsung (005930) is expected to take the wraps off its next-generation flagship smartphone in less than three weeks, but details surrounding the upcoming Galaxy S IV continue to trickle out in the meantime. The latest leak came on Friday from MobileFun, which published photos of what it claims to be third-party protective cases built for the Galaxy S IV.

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For almost as long as Apple’s iPhone has been in existence, analysts have claimed to see visions of a low-cost version of the device aimed at developing and prepaid markets. It’s easy to see why these visions have grown in magnitude and gained a more vocal following over the years: entering that market would, in theory, broaden Apple’s potential appeal by hundreds of millions of new customers. But I refer to the low-cost iPhone as a “siren song” for a reason – there’s a significant potential downside if Apple tries such a device and fails to impress.

The latest buzz around a budget iPhone device is being generated by a new investor note from Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty (via Business Insider), who provided three reasons for why she and her firm see a low-cost iPhone on the horizon. The iPad mini’s success in China and Brazil, Chinese consumers gravitating to the latest iPhone over older models, and surprise iPhone 4 demand were all seen as indicators that Apple will go budget in the near future.

Huberty met with Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer before penning the report, but she doesn’t directly attribute any of her reasoning for a cheaper iPhone to him directly. Other encounters between analysts and Apple execs have also left similar impressions, and Tim Cook even went so far as to tell Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi that the company had specific “clever things” planned to target the prepaid market, and that the company wasn’t “ceding any market” despite its continued efforts to target higher-end smartphone buyers.

Recently, there have been more indications that Apple might be going low-cost with a new iPhone design, including reports from the supply chain that a new model will come out with a plastic body and design cues from the current iPod touch. More reliable sources, including the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, have also chimed in (though they’ve thrown out the same idea in the past, actually right around when Tim Cook made his original statements to Sacconaghi).

A cheap iPhone is a tantalizing story because it’s a tantalizing product for investors, for consumers and for Apple itself. But Apple’s concern isn’t beating competitors on price, as it has said time and time again; it’s about delivering a no-compromise experience. So long as it can do that at a price point that makes more sense for the prepaid market, it would be happy to field such a device. The iPad mini is another example of Apple waiting to build a product people clamored for until it could get the experience up to its standards, and waiting has proven the right strategy there.

With a cheap iPhone, striking that balance is even more important. Apple has to deliver a product that allows it to maintain its reputation as a mobile platform with the best consumer experience. Doing anything else would invite comparison to other “good enough” budget products from rivals, which would undermine all of Apple’s efforts to brand itself as a premium maker of hardware and software. It’s a slippery slope, which is why, despite allusions made by Cook two years ago to a strategy that embraces the pre-paid market, we’ve seen little, if any deviation from its standard course since then.

Analysts love the idea of a low-cost iPhone because it looks like ripe, juicy, low-hanging fruit. But Apple is rightfully cautious because it has built a brand on produce from higher up in the tree. Huawei and ZTE have shown how it can be difficult to start as a budget brand and claw your way up in consumer eyes, and their marketing struggles are probably a good indication of why Apple, if it is going to go after the prepaid crowd, will have to do so very, very carefully to avoid being lost in the deep.