MWC 2024 Trends and Analysis
Context
This year’s Mobile World Congress was a return to crowded halls, Chinese OEMs, laptops, wearables, and a continuation of the “AI is coming!” panic/opportunity narrative. Here were the trends, demos, and conversations that stood out — and what should have, but didn’t.
AI: On and Off Device
The best demo at MWC was MediaTek’s astonishing real-time generative AI demo. MediaTek’s PR rep had a Dimensity 9300 reference phone in airplane mode running Stable Diffusion Turbo XL directly on device, and as you changed the text prompt, the image changed as you typed. If we’re going to have genAI stickers for chat apps, performance like this is going to make all the difference.
The second-best demo at MWC was also AI-related, and located in rival Qualcomm’s booth, where Humane was showing off live demos of its AI Pin. The AI Pin is doing its AI processing in the cloud, not on device, and I saw some slight delays due to cell coverage on the show floor, but nothing too bad. Humane needs better app integration and the price point is an issue, but it's a lot more usable and useful than a lot of people expect. For example, "Where can I get kosher food?" returned correct info quickly. Some of this can be handled by an AI on your phone while wearing Bluetooth earbuds, or a nearby Amazon Echo, or smartglasses. But a comm badge on your chest that can tap-to-answer questions like, "what's my next meeting?" or "where is Qualcomm’s booth at MWC?” could be amazing once Humane achieves deep integration with calendars and other data sources.
I was hoping to get a demo of Rabbit’s R1 that was announced at CES, but even the head of Rabbit PR was not able to wrest a prototype away from the engineering team to show it off in Barcelona. The first 100,000 production units should start arriving to customers in late April, so the wait should not be too much longer.
T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom showed off an "app-free," "large action models" AI concept smartphone. This is conceptually similar to what Rabbit is trying to do with its R1 accessory only on the phone itself. Live demos of the AI Phone included launching an assistant from the home screen, booking flights, or suggesting appropriate gifts. This is all cloud-based, but the phone is built on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and could move to a hybrid model over time. The T-Mobile AI Phone actually looked less like a pure concept device and more like a very early preproduction REVVL phone. T-Mobile began the REVVL line in the U.S. and it now comprises 6% of Deutsche Telekom’s smartphone lineup (I wrote about T-Mobile’s deeper push into REVVL phones and tablets here).
Samsung launched the Galaxy S24 line at a January Unpacked event in San Jose, and the company had no new mobile hardware at MWC. Still, Samsung’s AI-first branding remained distinctive thanks to a combination of semi-exclusive Google features and Samsung’s own additions. Other OEMs talked about AI camera features and running LLMs on their phones in the lab, but none fully committed to AI as the main competitive differentiator for this model year like Samsung did.
China Was Back in Force
In 2022, China was still shut down by Covid restrictions, and even as those lifted towards the end of the year, it was too late to make large-scale trade show commitments. In addition, the smartphone business was in a post-pandemic slump. MWC 2024 saw a much bigger Chinese presence, both in terms of booth space, attendees, and product announcements — and even some experimentation. Some highlights:
With OPPO’s IP problems addressed with new licensing deals, OPPO signed a "three year alliance" with Telefonica in meetings on Monday at MWC, and then announced it at an event that evening (which seemed to catch Telefonica’s rep by surprise). OPPO also announced that its premium Find X smartphones will be coming back to Europe. Some of OPPOs products have global echoes in sub-brand OnePlus’s lineup, but, at least for now the Air Glass 3 smart glasses prototypes are OPPO-only. The glasses are unobtrusive, contain an OPPO-developed resin waveguide display, are presumably based on Qualcomm’s XR silicon, and are exceptionally light at 50 grams.
TCL is still aiming at the lower end of the smartphone market, but it has unique differentiation with its low-eyestrain NXTPAPER displays that are starting to ship with select models of its 50 series smartphones. These heavily filtered LCD panels dramatically reduce glare so much that they appear to be a type of color e-ink, but, unlike e-ink, NXTPAPER has no issues with refresh rate. Early versions of the technology had poor saturation and brightness, but these upcoming NXTPAPER displays have gotten good enough that if you don’t directly compare them to OLED, color and brightness are more than acceptable. NXTPAPER is also going into large format (14”) premium Android tablets powered by MediaTek Dimensity 8020, and inexpensive 5G tablets from U.S. carriers.
OnePlus recently launched the OnePlus 12 and 12R, so the only new phone it had at MWC was a Genshin Impact special edition of the 12R. The light purple phone is the first special edition of its kind to be made available in the U.S., and at $399, it’s actually a good value. However, the main product launch for the brand at the show was a wearable with a redemption arc: the OnePlus Watch 2. OnePlus’ first Watch was really just a watch-shaped fitness band (and not a good one), but the new model features Google’s WearOS and subsystem that allows OnePlus to use a Snapdragon W5 and a separate coprocessor to save battery life. I actually wore the OnePlus Watch 2 throughout MWC and it made it through 2.5 days of heavy use before going into battery saving mode. Not quite the 100 hours promised, but still excellent given how I was using it.
Nothing is still a startup, but it has sold over 2.5 million phones and earbuds. The company teased the Nothing 2(a) with an event in Barcelona before actually launching the $350 MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro -based phone the week later in India.
With British ruggedized handset vendor Bullitt Group going under, I looked around the show floor to see if there was an obvious replacement beyond Sonim, and found ulefone. The Shenzhen-based company was founded in 2014 and has sold over 10 million devices, including ‘normal’ ruggedized phones, but also some rather unique ones. The ulefone Armor 24 has a 22,000 mAh battery, and, unlike Aventir Telecom’s 28,000 mAh Energizer phone, the ulefone is actually shipping. The Power Armor 18 Ultra has a MediaTek Dimensity 7050 SoC, a 9600 mAh battery, Corning Gorilla Glass 5, an internal Flir thermal sensor, and a pogo pin connector for accessories, including three different endoscopes, perfect for all sorts of contractor and maintenance needs.
ZTE attempted to corner the market on value with its Nubia Focus line, which features 108MP cameras, and a new Neo 2 5G budget gaming phone -- both starting at just $199. However, my favorite phone launch at MWC was the $149 Nubia Music. Remember Nokia XpressMusic and Sony Ericsson Walkman phones in the pre-smartphone era? ZTE is bringing something like that back, taking a basic Android phone and embedding a giant speaker on the rear of the colorful case, and dual headphone jacks on top.
Xiaomi brought an entire house, complete with a doghouse (for a robot pet) and garage (it was showing off its electric SUV concept). Xiaomi did have new smartphones, tablets, and laptops on display, but they were sandwiched in between refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and an animated desk lamp that looked suspiciously like Pixar’s Luxo.
HONOR’s sales have soared as Chinese have turned to it as an alternative to Huawei. At MWC, HONOR announced global versions of the Magic6 Pro and extremely thin Magic V2 large foldable.
Speaking of Huawei, while its phones and wearables remain constrained by U.S. sanctions and sales are primarily in mainland China rather than across Europe and Asia, Huawei’s device sales inside China have begun to recover. Huawei had its usual enormous booth that took up 2/3 of Hall 1 at MWC, but, unlike last year, there were tables and tables of phones, foldable, laptops, watches, and smart glasses on display, not just infrastructure.
More Intel and AMD Laptops, Still No Snapdragon X Elite
Intel and AMD launched new processors with NPUs in late 2023, and PC OEMs have been refreshing their lineups with the new silicon ever since. While there were AI demos in Qualcomm’s booth and it was a subject of several of my discussions behind closed doors, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite platform had no public presence with OEMs or carriers at the biggest global mobile conference. Qualcomm is clearly coordinating product announcements closer to launch this summer, but it still felt like a missed opportunity, particularly around 5G connectivity.
Samsung missed its own opportunity to showcase its Galaxy Book laptop line at Unpacked in San Jose after CES, but it did have the Galaxy Book4 at MWC with updated Intel silicon. There are five laptops in the line now, all featuring a thin and light design, with the top three models featuring Intel Core Ultra processors and 3K AMOLED displays, and the Galaxy Book4 Ultra getting an updated NVIDIA GPU.
The HONOR MagicBook Pro 16 is a MacBook clone; it’s not ‘inspired by’ Apple, it looks identical externally with just a numeric keypad as a differentiator inside. The Windows machine is powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40. It is launching first in China with a global release expected in Q2.
Lenovo updated its high-volume enterprise ThinkPad T lineup with new processors, including the ThinkPad T14 i Gen 5, ThinkPad T14s Gen 5, ThinkPad T16 Gen 3, ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 2 and ThinkBook 14 2-in-1 Gen 4. In a great move for accessibility, the ThinkPad T series is integrating tactile markings on keys to make keyboard navigation easier for the visually impaired – and everybody else. Lenovo is also capitulating to muscle memory everywhere and putting the CTRL and Fn keys in the correct configuration on the left edge of the keyboard. Lenovo also showed off Smart Connect, an impressive software integration suite built around Motorola smartphones that goes well beyond Microsoft’s Phone Link. Smart Connect will work with most Motorola smartphones and any Windows laptop and/or Android tablet, but it seems designed to boost combined sales of ThinkPhones and ThinkPads.
Dell similarly updated its commercial lineup at MWC, highlighting both the new Copilot key and AI for Windows Studio effects thanks to the updated Intel chips in a Latitude convertible and Precision 3000 and 5000 series workstations. The only unique news was a small form factor workstation, The Precision 3280 CFF (Compact Form Factor) for aimed at light AI development and creative applications with Tensor Core GPUs alongside Intel Core processors.
HP held off at MWC in favor of its Amplify channel event it held a week later in Las Vegas, where it unleashed a slew of new hardware in both Intel and AMD variants. The specs on the updated products are competitive, but HP is really stepping up its designs for sustainability and its emphasis on resellers for its sales strategy.
Wearables and XR/Spatial Computing
There were so many head-mounted wearables at CES that I wrote a dedicated report, CES 2024: All The Things I Put On My Face. There were not quite as many wearables at MWC, but it was still a substantial category. Qualcomm’s booth in particular had so many tables filled with Snapdragon-powered headsets that I needed to switch to a wide-angle lens to get them in a picture.
I met with XREAL at CES and tried on their Air 2 Ultra smart glasses, which should be shipping to developers shortly. At MWC I sat down with XREAL’s CEO to discuss the rest of its near-to-mid-term roadmap and try some prototypes. The [redacted] easily wins the award for Best [Redacted] I’m Not Allowed to Talk About Yet. Watch this company.
At MWC 2023 I got a demo of Wearable Devices’ prototype Mudra Band that reads the nerve impulses in your arm to give spatial computing devices a hands-free, low-cost control mechanism. In the year since, not only has the product shipped, but Wearable Devices added 6DOF, moved all computing on-device (rather than on a phone), and doesn’t require individual user calibration. The production unit simply worked better, too.
To close out its Unpacked event after CES, Samsung teased the Galaxy Ring. At that event, I was briefed by Hon Pak, Samsung’s Head of Health and allowed to try on a Galaxy Ring prototype, but we were not allowed to take any pictures. At MWC, Samsung had a lucite display box in its booth with the Galaxy Ring in multiple sizes and all three finishes – but wouldn’t let me take one out of the display for a better photo. In any case, the Galaxy Ring will be shipping later this year and will be focused on sleep tracking along with basic fitness metrics.
Just after the show, LG and Meta announced that they’re doing something together in XR.
what We DIDN’t HEAR ENOUGH ABOUT
Satellite
Starlink had a booth at MWC for the first time. It was a meeting space – no publicly accessible demos – but Starlink is a key part of the telecom infrastructure at this point, so an official presence makes a lot of sense. There was a scattering of satellite terrestrial displays inside carrier booths, but nothing like last year when Qualcomm was pushing Snapdragon Satellite (before dropping it), and MediaTek was showing off its standards-based approach (before its launch partner, Bullitt Group, went out of business).
RedCap 5G
The reduced capacity (“RedCap”) flavor of the 5G standard is now showing up in products. Despite its name, RedCap actually provides quite a lot of capacity for IoT and even some cellular broadband applications, at a much lower cost, and I was expecting to see it all over the show. Instead, the few RedCap announcements at MWC were decidedly low key. TCL launched a RedCap dongle based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X35 Modem RF system, and Fibocom held the world’s smallest press conference at its booth to launch a series of MediaTek-based embedded RedCap IoT modules.
Other 5G Improvements
In what may have been the most underrated news at the show, Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF System. Modem updates aren’t sexy and RF is engineering black magic, so the improvements in the upcoming Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF system can be hard to parse for consumers and the press – and few seem to have bothered. The X80 improvements are not just faster wireless speeds, but also the ability for your phone to find your location faster when you get out of a subway or building. That's a meaningful quality of life improvement.
Sustainability
In a sure sign of progress, sustainability was less of a buzzword at MWC 2024 and is becoming an element baked into the supply chain (we started seeing this at CES 2024 as well). Zyxel got my attention with the best use of sustainable materials. Its MediaTek-based 5G FWA router with Wi-Fi 7 is going through telcos in The Netherlands and Australia (to start), and the housings are made of 95% (!) post-consumer recycled plastics. Lenovo is using more recycled materials in its hardware as well, but it was so committed to repairability that it gave iFixit a dedicated area inside the Lenovo’s own MWC booth.
(And 6G)
6G hasn’t been defined as a standard, and it’s arguably too early to even start discussing what 6G would even look like, but that has never stopped vendors from jumping the gun before. But there was essentially no serious discussion of 6G at MWC24 beyond notions that it will involve AI somehow.
And Finally: Concept Devices
There were several concept devices (or CGI renders) scattered around the show, including Deutsche Telekom’s robot routers. Why you want your router following you around the house was not explained.
A slightly – and only slightly – more practical concept was Motorola’s working flexible smartphone concept that resembles a slap bracelet. The idea itself has merit. Wearing your phone can leave your hands free, and it could be a good fit in medical environments, for waiters, and in hospitality. Plus, a portion of the display becomes a smartwatch when magnetically attached to a bracelet companion. However, it is nearly impossible to believe that exposing the flexible display all the time – let alone forcibly bending it backwards over and over – would survive the company’s durability requirements.
My favorite concept device at MWC was from Motorola’s parent Lenovo. The ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop Concept is completely impractical, but it looks like something from a sci-fi movie set. In fact, I’m not sure what the purpose of the completely transparent 17.3-inch Micro-LED transparent display is beyond use as a prop, but it’s cool.
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