MWC 2023: Back To Full Strength
I take a version of this picture every year.
MWC 2023 Themes
MWC is back. The GSMA reported that over 88,500 people attended the show this year. Compared to last year, where numbers were closer to 60,000 and Hall 8 was shuttered, MWC2023 felt like it was at capacity (Techsponential attended live last year as well). Pre-pandemic attendance peaked at 109,000, but Barcelona is not Las Vegas, and even when transit workers choose not to strike, Barcelona cannot really handle that much volume. As it was, with just under 90,000 attendees this year, parts of the Fira were extremely crowded. Cab lines were endless, but public transportation mostly held up with glitches only on the first day.
Apple was, of course, publicly absent from the show, preferring to host its own events. That makes MWC an Android-centric show by default. Google had its usual Android setup between Hall 2 & 3 and a pin collection quest in its area and across the show at OEM booths. These consumer-oriented experiences would work better at IFA (or music festivals) instead of a trade show, but they were on message, promoting Better Together and exposing core features that consumers often don’t know about.
Chinese phones are coming (to Europe and Asia). There was a tremendous number of phone news at the show. However, some of the devices being announced were not technically new, just new to global markets, and by global, we mean “not the U.S.” (More details below.)
Much of the hardware announced at MWC isn’t destined for U.S. markets, but U.S. carriers were there in force, talking about their networks and global enterprise capabilities. (More details below.)
Satellite telephony. If Techsponential gave out “Best of” awards, Bullitt Group’s Motorola-branded MediaTek MT6825-powered satellite puck would have won: $99 for the device plus $5/month gets you 30 messages a month on a small device that hangs off your bag with its carabiner clip and connects to the phone you already own over Bluetooth. The clear pricing and obvious use case for hiking, hunting, fishing, and more mean this should fly off the shelves at Wal-Mart, REI, Cabelas, etc. when it arrives in North America next month.
MediaTek was hardly the only satellite telephony solution at the show. Ericsson was showing off a simulated satellite call using Qualcomm technology in its booth. Qualcomm also announced smartphone OEMs planning to support its Iridium-based Snapdragon Satellite solution include Honor, Nothing, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, and Motorola again (this time the Lenovo division, not Bullitt Group). T-Mobile noted its planned collaboration with SpaceX at its presentation in Deutsche Telekom’s booth, while Deutsche Telekom itself announced plans for a satellite IoT solution with Intelsat and Skylo. Finally, in private meetings, Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite came up in conversation at least half a dozen times.
XR was big. While AR and VR were major themes at CES (see the last section in our CES coverage) XR was all over MWC, too. This is partly due to expectations that Apple is entering the market, and part spillover effect of Qualcomm’s heavy participation at the show and its dominant position in XR silicon. (More details below.)
MWC 2023 Highlights and analysis
MWC 2023: The Phones
MediaTek debuted its MT6825 standalone satellite connectivity chipset, and in addition to the $99 puck noted above, Bullitt Group is also building it into phones for enterprises and rugged-oriented consumers who want an integrated solution. The Moto Defy will be shipping in the coming weeks for North America, and the essentially identical CAT S75 is available in Europe today.
Samsung Unpacked preceded MWC by just two weeks, so the company launched no new phones in Barcelona. Instead, Samsung recycled the sets and experiences from the pop-up Samsung Experience center in San Francisco in its MWC booth. This was a smart use of resources – what better way to underline its sustainability message than reusing existing material and design. It seemed effective, too – I saw different Samsung regional sales staff taking their carrier partners through each demo.
Just after MWC Samsung announced the Galaxy A54 mid-tier smartphone which is powered by Samsung’s Exynos 1380 and will be sold essentially everywhere but China.
Like Samsung, OPPO launched new phones just prior to (and just after) MWC, but it was nice to be able to get hands on in the booth with the fold-smaller Find N2 Flip and OnePlus’ upcoming Tab, its premium Android tablet. Both are MediaTek Dimensity design wins and could be found at MediaTek’s booth as well.
OPPO’s post-MWC flagship launch, the Find X6 Pro, features its own Marisilicon neural processor sitting between the lenses and a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC for noise reduction in the RAW domain before handing it off to Qualcomm for image processing/computational photography. The Find X6 line is currently China-only, which is likely why the company held it back from Barcelona.
Xiaomi’s sales have been under pressure in its home market and abroad, but that didn’t prevent it from pushing forward with the global launch of its Xiaomi 13 Pro flagship smartphone. The phone launched in China in December, and is now coming to Europe with a “bio-ceramic” rear panel, 1 inch-class camera sensor with Leica tuning, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, and a price to match: €1,299.
Another China-first phone going global is Realme’s GT3, which is coming to European and Asian markets “in the coming months” for $649. The big differentiator for the near-flagship GT3 is absurdly fast 240W charging. Despite the U.S. denominated price – and the fact that Realme gave me a unit in New York City – this phone is unlikely to be sold in the U.S. both for distribution reasons and the fact that its key super-fast charging feature needs more power than U.S. 120V household outlets provide. I did test the GT3 in my hotel in Barcelona, intending to let it charge from 13% to 100% while taking a shower but I stopped to put something away and the phone hit 100% before I even made it into the shower. Fast charging indeed.
Like Xiaomi and Realme, Honor also had a phone on sale in China that it brought to MWC for expanded market availability: its first foldable, the Magic Vs. The Magic Vs is a fold-larger design, is completely flat when closed, and has strong specs including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. Honor hopes that by undercutting Samsung on pricing it will stand out. It is true that at €1599, the Vs is below Samsung's Galaxy Fold4’s launch price, but that phone is significantly less expensive in Europe today, and is often discounted further by carrier deals. Regardless, it still priced high enough that it limits the addressable market, but Honor is trying to establish itself as Huawei’s substitute at the top of the market, so having a foldable is crucial to Honor’s brand even if it doesn’t threaten Samsung much for now.
Honor also launched super-premium bar phone coming to China and Europe, the Magic5 Pro, featuring Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 silicon, a top-spec AMOLED display, and triple 50 MP cameras around back with top Dxomark scores. Honor certainly isn’t competing on price; the Magic5 Pro will cost €1,199. To compete in the mid-tier segment, Europe is also getting the €369 Honor Magic5 Lite, which has a big battery, a curved OLED display, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 695.
After failing to crack mid-tier and premium Android, HMD’s Nokia-branded phones retreated to the entry level, where they have still struggled despite clean software installs and promises of long upgrade cycles. At MWC, HMD showed off the Nokia G22, a basic phone that is easily repairable with a dedicated iFixit kit. This is great for sustainability, and while it is not a modular design like a Fairphone 4, it will only set you back $179 vs. Fairphone’s €579.00.
Tecno Mobile has been Africa’s inexpensive smartphone sales leader, but it is now looking to move significantly upmarket with its first foldable, a fold-larger design. The specs on the Phantom V Fold are quite respectable, including 120Hz refresh rates on internal and external display alike, a flagship-level MediaTek 9000+ with 12GB and 256GB of storage, and a 50MP triple camera setup around back. Its primary differentiation is price: the Phantom V Fold starts at $1100, which could be a tough sell for an unknown brand in much of the world, and is far out of reach for Tecno Mobile’s African customers.
Nothing had a brief press event at Qualcomm’s booth teasing the Nothing(2) smartphone coming later in the year with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 …and no other details. However, in the lead up to the non-news, CEO Carl Pei disclosed that the Phone(1) has sold 650,000 units to date – extraordinary numbers for a first phone.
That success has spurred imitators: Unihertz showed off Luna, a less expensive knock-off of the Nothing(1)’s LED-festooned design. The lesson here is that design differentiation alone is not a sustainable competitive advantage (and Chinese vendors move fast – the Nothing(1) is only six months old).
Blinky-light aesthetics aside, Unihertz specializes in finding niche markets large enough to support R&D, but small enough not to attract attention from larger OEMs. Its most popular phones look a lot like BlackBerries, and its representative assured me that these are successful enough that new versions are coming later this year.
While it was really just a timing issue, TCL seemingly got its geographies mixed up, launching the global 40-series smartphones at CES in the U.S., and the U.S. 40-series variants at MWC in Europe. Those include TCL 40 XE 5G, TCL 40 X 5G, as well as a 4G-only TCL 40 XL, proving that even in the U.S., there is still room for 4G phones to hit prepaid price points.
In addition to phones, TCL also announced two tablets: TCL NXTPAPER 11 ($249) and TCL TAB 11 ($179/$209 LTE). The NXTPAPER 11 features the second generation of TCL’s heavily-filtered display for eye comfort, and it is noticeably brighter, fixing a big drawback of the original.
Huawei took over nearly the entire Hall 1 (a tremendous amount of trade show real estate) but most of it was dedicated to its thriving infrastructure business. The devices group, under extreme pressure from U.S. sanctions, was relegated to a small section in front and had no new products. There were tables with HarmonyOS/Qualcomm 4G-only smartphones, Windows/Intel laptops, smartwatches, and wearable displays. A separate demo area highlighted impressive camera features and HarmonyOS fitness integration with gym equipment. Huawei’s e-ink tablets, PC monitors, and printers were left in China. If the political winds don’t shift — and if anything, they’re moving farther apart faster – MWC2023 could be the last show we see Intel-based MateBooks and Qualcomm-based Mate smartphones.
Smartphone Concepts and Components
Qualcomm was showing off an incredible stable diffusion AI demo running offline on-device, which was generating images in seconds. This is both a technology flex – mobile chipsets are now ridiculously powerful – and a likely future feature inside image and social media apps. This may have been the most impressive demo at the show.
The most exciting concept phone at MWC was Motorola’s RIZR, which features a rollable display wrapped around the back of the phone on the bottom, only to rise up in front when more screen real estate is needed. The screen also rolls down to reveal a hidden speaker and selfie camera when needed. Unlike most concepts, this was more than just a hardware prototype – Motorola spent time optimizing the software, suggesting that the company may plan to bring this to market. Whether a raised exposed display is durable enough to survive the real world is an open question, but its undeniably cool.
Motorola’s parent Lenovo announced a slate of new 13th gen Intel laptops at the show, but its concept laptop garnered the most attention. Like the RIZR, Lenovo’s laptop concept features a rollable display that grows taller for more vertical real estate, which is great for editing documents, coding, and web design. Unlike the RIZR, the rollable laptop can’t be turned on its side for a bigger landscape mode, but, also unlike the RIZR, the display has some case/scaffolding protecting it when extended, and when retracted it rolls inside the body of the laptop rather than exposed around back. Lenovo’s rollable laptop is obviously an early stage prototype, but it is encouraging that Lenovo is thinking through use cases and benefits for this, not just folding/rolling/swiveling just because they can.
OnePlus held a press conference mostly to announce a smartphone concept phone with liquid active cooling which looks great on the transparent case, but doesn’t offer enough of a performance benefit to justify the added complexity. OnePlus also promised its first foldable with global distribution – this will almost certainly be based on one of OPPO’s Find N foldables – and could be the first non-Motorola foldable competition for Samsung in the U.S.
TCL showed off a NXTPAPER concept phone, using the same matte/diffuse LCD display technology from some of its tablets. There is no question that reducing blue light and eye strain is needed on phones, not just tablets, but it is definitely a niche market, and it may be impossible to line up the consumers willing to pay for a less-dynamic, deliberately less-sharp display with the right phone configuration.
In addition to its first folding phone, Tecno Mobile showed off Chameleon coloring technology concept for smartphone rear covers. Chameleon uses “sub-micron prism material” to support up to 1600 colors and allowing full user customization – a delightful upgrade to the polychromatic photoisotomer tech used in the Camon 19 Pro Mondrian Edition we wrote about last year.
TrinamiX’s live skin sensors are finally starting to get embedded in phones for security, so naturally the company is looking for new markets. It is extending its technology into automotive (authentication) and consumer wellness (hydration).
The Wireless Power Consortium’s Qi2, announced at CES, showed continued momentum with a booth at the show, but was not featured prominently in vendor booths. Qi2 works with Apple’s MagSafe, handles more power, and attaches magnetically to more things/at angles.
MWC 2023: XR
Qualcomm is the clear leader in XR silicon, having gotten in early and with continued investment in software and APIs (Snapdragon Spaces), AR-specific chipsets, and reference designs. You could see this made real in the design wins on the tables at Qualcomm’s booth and in Snapdragon Spaces partner announcements; with expectations that Apple will be launching a VR headset with passthrough later this year, Qualcomm’s ecosystem is the only reasonable way to get to market quickly.
Xiaomi announced its Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, AR glasses based on Qualcomm’s XR2 Gen 2 platform and Snapdragon Spaces. Oddly, Xiaomi did not announce any Snapdragon Spaces smartphones to go along with the glasses. At the moment, only rival OnePlus’ 11 5G is officially Snapdragon Spaces-ready, but it is hard to believe that Xiaomi won’t have multiple compatible handsets by the time its glasses reach the market.
OPPO announced its AirGlass 2 AR glasses late last year and was showing off the Snapdragon 4100-based prototype at MWC. The design looks polished even if the software is extremely early. In additiona to be exceptionally light, AirGlass 2 uses OPPO-designed resin SRG-diffractive waveguide lens, which allows for vision correction in addition to display. If this works it could open the market up considerably for AR – more than half the population need corrective lenses today.
Wearable Devices was showing off an Apple Watch band with sensors that allow for neural gesture control over Apple ecosystem devices. This is a fun gadget today with potential accessibility applications, but where it really gets interesting is AR control. Using cameras and AI for input control is expensive (if not in components, in processing power and heat) and the glasses need to be able see your hands at all times. Swiping the temple of your glasses is limiting and awkward. By reading the nerve impulses in your arm with a watch band, Wearable Devices can give future AR headsets a low-cost, easy to use, flexible control mechanism.
In a booth in between halls, I got heads-on with Vuzix Shield, a single-color (any color you want as long as it's green) dual-waveguide AR glasses for enterprise use cases (ex: safety). The Shield is surprisingly comfortable even over glasses with a clear, centered image.
Along with VR and AR glasses, there were several less ambitious wearable displays at MWC, including ZTE’s Nubia Neovision Glass with a 120-inch virtual screen and a micro OLED display.
MWC: U.S. Carriers in Europe
You would expect Vodafone and Orange to have large booths at a European telecom show (and they did), but U.S. carriers – and even an MVNO – showed up as well.
AT&T had a booth on the show floor, but it was entirely set up as meeting rooms for private discussions.
Cox Mobile didn’t have a booth at the Fira, but the MVNO hosted a press conference on the other side of the city one evening to discuss its strategy. Cox is late to the cable/wireless MVNO game, having just launched at CES on Verizon’s network. Cox Mobile is initially targeting consumers, though SMB is “when, not if,” and, like other cable MVNOs, is structuring its value proposition as a pricing bundle. Over time, the plan is to converge home and mobile services (ex: parental controls) and network access (broadband failover to wireless).
T-Mobile US was camped out in partial owner Deustche Telekom’s theater area, giving multiple presentations. The news came in CTO Neville Ray’s final public MWC keynote on the third day of the show: T-Mobile is the first to offer 4-channel carrier aggregation (3Gbps down on consumer smartphones) with Samsung network equipment. It will be moving to 6 or 7 channels of carrier aggregation in the future, which should push theoretical speed limits even higher. VoNR is also coming to select cities, which means that calls in those areas on 5G phones won't require a 4G network at all.
Verizon was focused on enterprise use cases at its booth, highlighting that while it is a U.S. network operator, it has global offices, assets, and capabilities. Demo stations included an interactive whiteboard for illustrating systems too large to show off at a trade show, a private 5G network tower, and a real-time computer vision system using that network. My favorite demo at the show (just from a personal perspective) was testing the NFL’s upcoming coach-to-coach communication system that will be running on private Verizon 5G networks in all NFL stadiums next year and pretending to call plays. Pretty sure I’d be a terrible coach, but one can dream…
MWC 2023: Odds and Ends
Microsoft announced that it is making it easier to use iPhones with Windows. Android still gives Microsoft more access for integration, but I love this direction. Insider preview for now.
Just ahead of MWC, Qualcomm announced a new Aware IoT platform, encompassing silicon, cloud services, and a new transactional API business model. The messaging around Aware was somewhat confusing – and rival IoT silicon vendors are spreading FUD that Qualcomm is competing with its customers. The demos at Qualcomm’s MWC booth provided much-needed clarity, showing off intriguing use cases such as monitoring individual electric poles.
Bluetooth Auracast is Bluetooth SIG’s new branding for broadcast audio, and there were ears-on demos near the convention center showing how it can be used for utility and accessibility in auditoriums, crowded spaces, sharing personal audio, and for multiple audio streams (different games/announcers/languages). However, since Auracast is just a branded implementation of a standard Bluetooth LE profile, I fully expect Apple to add some proprietary silicon and spatial audio on top and do its own compatible-but-different AirPlay Broadcast or AppleCast or the like.
Huawei was the latest to fall victim to “because we can” convergence: its Watch Buds conceal tiny wireless earbuds inside a smartwatch. While this seems clever, it means that neither the earbuds (which have reduced battery life) or the watch (which is thicker and also has lower battery life) are optimized and competitive.
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