MADRID: The Mobile World Congress will be kicked off today, Monday March 2 in Barcelona, opining its fourth annual event with the theme of MMIX Mobile Music, Innovation, eXperience bringing together a host of industry-leading.
Samsung, fellow South Korean firm LG and hip Chinese maker HTC timed their smartphone launches to grab the attention on the eve of the Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest telecoms trade fair, in Barcelona, Spain.
Along with the launches of numerous new smartphones — dominated by South Korean giant Samsung — tech firms are trying to conquer users’ bodies and connect their environments.
Several makers are set to unveil new “smartwatches,” some of which will have users chattering into their cuffs or getting on-wrist e-mail updates, at the four-day Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in northeastern Spain.
Tech executives and regulators will meanwhile seek to chart a course for a new age of wireless networks that could lead to billions of objects being connected, from cars to refrigerators.
“It’s a showpiece for smartphones in the short term, but it’ll go way beyond smartphones,” said Nigel Major, a top executive at tech group Laird.
“The most exciting trend we can see is the proliferation of connected devices everywhere we go. Ten years from now, virtually everything you’re looking at will have the potential to be connected.”
On Sunday evening, Samsung is expected to unveil its Galaxy S6 smartphone, the larger Galaxy S6 Edge “phablet,” and the latest in its series of watches.
Samsung is the world’s biggest seller of smartphones but saw its share of the world market fall in 2014 from 34 percent to 20 percent, according to research group IDC.
It faces a squeeze by Chinese phone makers on one side and on the other by US titan Apple, which released its iPhone 6 last year.
Now they hope some big product launches this year can make smartwatches a mainstream gadget and boost sales of other wearables.
In Barcelona, “low-cost smartphones will feature prominently, as will wearables,” it said. “We expect an avalanche of new products.”
