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Google was everywhere at MWC, starting with this traffic bridge.
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The Fira Gran Via, the home of MWC. It's big.
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As this map helpfully points out, it's an 18-minute walk from one end to the other, provided you take the skybridge and use the moving sidewalks.
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This is what the show floor looks like. It's always a teeming mass of people.
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SK Telecom had a really awesome booth display. It was super bright and showed a fancy animation.
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I had never heard of Vietnamese cell company Viettel but they had a beautiful booth design.
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Huawei likes to take over about half of hall 1 and then make it private. You have to have an invite to enter the booth. I like the design: "We do stuff in the cloud, so lets decorate with actual clouds!"
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A Google Booth! It was private.
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So was this one.
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"Aol," "Verizon," "Building brands people love." If you say so.
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I think it was a requirement for every booth to say "5G" somewhere.
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VR was everywhere at MWC this year. I'd say about half the booths had a Vive, Rift, Gear VR, or Hololens. This is HTC's green-screen setup.
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There were lots of "arcady" VR-assisted machines. I'm going to assume this would make anyone ready to vomit.
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These guys were carrying a big stack of Hololenses.
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Sit in the egg, strap on the goggles, and drift away...
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MWC: Home to ridiculous pitches like this. I'm fine with my dumb shoes.
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Google turned the space in between halls 2 and 3 into "Android Village." There were statues, food, tablets, and fresh air.
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Another statue.
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Google brought part of the forest scene to life with Daydream VR.
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This map was basically my MWC to-do list.
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Oddly, the Ubuntu booth was full of robots. The idea is that Ubuntu makes a great base OS for ROS, the open source Robotic Operating System.
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Here's another robot. This one was very good at falling over.
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This guy's brain is probably being uploaded to the Matrix.
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You've probably seen these "neck headphone" designs before, but this was a neck speaker with optional headphones.
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I love seeing serious networking equipment like this. This is a wireless signal tester.
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I like playing the "What the heck is that?!" game at MWC. Anyone know what this propane-tank-on-a-stick does? Is it an antenna?
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Best job at MWC goes to this guy, who was paid to play with Legos all day.
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Worst job goes to this poor soul, a human/roach hybrid.
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Actually maybe "worst job" goes to these two, who were stuck in "mirror robot" costumes.
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Duckface.now! OK...
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Nokia had a race track in its booth...
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...and a mini stadium, showing how event connectivity could work.
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The most packed part of this booth was the HMD/Nokia phone section. It was hidden off in a tiny corner of the Nokia booth but was absolutely mobbed.
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Google's hot air balloon was promoting Android Messages, which supports RCS (an SMS upgrade) now.
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A robot playing the drums.
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I was more interested in the controller for the drumming robot. Neat!
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HTC Vive gloves.
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Peugeot had this crazy concept car on display.
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The back of the Peugeot Instinct.
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An F1 car!
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This impossible car-like sculpture is called the "IED Shiwa."
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The back.
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An SD card with NFC? You tap your phone against the card and can see a preview of the pictures.
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This diorama was really nice.
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A band!
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Another person in a robot suit.
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Samsung was continually reminding people about the next big smartphone get-together, the Galaxy S8 launch.
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Go Pro brought along an awesome looking Land Rover Defender.
BARCELONA—Most pictures you find of Mobile World Congress (MWC) are likely to be the same thing: a picture of a smartphone or tablet tethered to a table. MWC is more than just a collection of smartphones on tables, though. It's always fun to point the camera at all the other things that happen at the big show to bring a bit of the MWC experience home. MWC is full of massive crowds and hundreds of vendors all competing for attention. The need to stand out leads to a crazy atmosphere, with interesting booth designs, LED light shows, sculptures. decorations, and all sorts of fun booth gimmicks.
One thing you might not know about MWC is that it's huge. The venue, Fira Barcelona Gran Via, has 2.5 million square feet of exhibition space stretched across eight halls (by comparison, the home of CES, the Las Vegas Convention Center, offers 2 million square feet of space for exhibitors). MWC doesn't just take up the exhibition space, though; the show also spills out into the area between halls, where you'll find food vendors, the occasional car test drive, and lots of other promotions set up.
Getting around is pretty easy, as there's a massive skybridge that connects all the halls together. It's basically the "highway" of MWC, saving you from having to fight your way through the show floor to get from A to B. It's an 18-minute walk from one end to the other, provided you use all the moving sidewalks.
It's easy to pick out the trends from MWC this year. Almost every booth had some kind of VR or AR gimmick—you could find Vives, Rifts, Hololenses, and Gear VRs no matter where you looked. This was also the year of "5G"—you could find the buzzword plastered somewhere on most booths, regardless of whether or not the company had anything to do with a 5G rollout. There were also a ton of robots, cars, and costumes.
As usual, nearly everything ran Android, and Google had a big presence at the show. This year, Google used the between-the-halls space to set up an "Android Village" rest area with drinks, tables, and product demos. The Android pin collection game was back, which sent attendees running from booth to booth to collect all the Android lapel pins from each OEM. The game was upgraded this year with a "passport" and stickers for tracking your collection progress, although after dominating the game a few years ago, I resisted the urge to go on a pin-collection spree.
Samsung was everywhere in Barcelona, too. The company plastered the outside of the Gran Via with "Galaxy" flags and advertisements, and it had tons of ads at the Barcelona Airport, too. Everyone at the show knew the Galaxy S8 was coming, and Samsung made sure to not let anyone forget.
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