Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is ticking overwhelming. The launches of the major phone makers over the weekend and Monday morning were added, where all day yesterday, several news stories.

Regarding the hardware, Huawei and Panasonic showed the teams that want to compete in the crowded world of smartphones. The Chinese giant continues its strategy to focus on quality, which started a couple of years. Thus, the Huawei Ascend D offers a screen 4.5 "and resolution 1280 x 720 pixels, Android 4 and a quad-core chip developed in-house, the K3V2, which runs at 1.5 GHz has a profile of 8, 9 mm, 1800 mAh battery and an 8 megapixel camera capable of recording Full HD video. Another computer with quad-core chip is the ZTE was, that uses an Nvidia Tegra 3, Android, and has a screen of 4.3 ". Meanwhile, Panasonic has Android Eluga Power 4 ", 5" display (1280 x 720 pixels), S4 Snapdragon chip dual-core 1.5 GHz and 8 megapixel camera, the company had presented a few days to dry Eluga with 4.3 "screen and water resistance and dust.

The unique Asus Padfone, meanwhile, is an Android smartphone with dual-core chip can be inserted into a special housing that transforms him into a tablet 10.1 "(using the hardware of the mobile base) if also using the additional dock may become a smartbook (a laptop running Android). And not all: includes a capacitive stylus to write on the screen that also acts as a Bluetooth handsfree.

Many of the attendees also noted, in the words of Paul Otellini, Intel CEO during the conference that resulted in Congress while adding manufacturer ZTE as its chips used in mobile phones, said its chip Z2460 (known as Medfield, an adapted version of Atom mobile) will arrive at 2 GHz, and the company is preparing a second version that will double its performance while reducing energy consumption. "We want to be a minor player in the mobile world," he said.

Among the contenders is Qualcomm, which announced its intention to upgrade its high-end Snapdragon chip S4, the new Pro version has an improved graphics processor, support for high resolution screens and a module for processing data from the cameras that would allow in theory, leverage the benefits of a device as Lytro (a camera that captures all the light field can be of the same image).

With respect to software, there were two big news: on the one hand, the expected availability of the beta of Skype for Windows Phone 7, plus the electronic book reader offers for your Nokia mobile with that operating system. Furthermore, the Opera browser update, the full version for smartphones is now 12, with better performance in loading pages HTML5. Opera Mini also presented Next, the version for smaller teams that reduces and streamlines the transfer of data between the website and phone. In this case, the Next now integrated access to Twitter and Facebook on its home page, while, according to its developers, improved text handling in loading pages.

There was also news in relation to operating systems. So, Canonical was showing its version of Ubuntu for Android smartphones that style webtop Motorola Use the phone as such and switch to an Ubuntu when connected to a base and a monitor. There was, however, announcements of adoption by a manufacturer, as happened with Boot 2 Gecko (B2G), the Mozilla Foundation project to create a Linux-based operating system that you use the Firefox browser engine and applications written in HTML5 for all its graphical interface, much like how the unfortunate WebOS. The news here is that Telefonica, Qualcomm announced their explicit support to the project, ensuring that the Spanish company will see the first device with B2G market this year.

News had another close call. Not because of his action, but reaction to his announcement of a couple of weeks ago when the Spanish operator Wanda became official, the mobile payment service will offer customers associated with MasterCard. During the Mobile World Congress was known to his opponent: the resulting joint agreement between Visa and the operator Vodafone, which as Wanda aims to be the vehicle through which users upload to the world of mobile payments, ie the Using the phone as a digital wallet. With less visibility, but in the same way, Western Digital has partnered with WIND operator to offer its money transfer service from mobiles in Italy.

Perhaps the most notable news in terms of the operators is Joyn, a platform shared by several GSM Alliance members to offer what they call rich communication services, and for now is just an instant messenger, in fact, is called "the WhatsApp of operators", but it is an open standard that provides for the use of video, geolocation, and more. Not the first time the phone together to provide a service already available as part of an operating system created in 2010 WAC, a platform for creating applications that store is shared by 24 operators around the world.

Mobile World Congress continues until Thursday, although most companies already showed all his cards. However, Microsoft need to show, tomorrow, developing its consumer version of Windows 8