Mobile World Congress kicks off properly today in Barcelona, and my feed is already the usual firehose of press-release paraphrasing. Nokia's got the Lumia 520 and Lumia 720 out this morning, Mozilla's got its Firefox OS partner phones from the likes of ZTE and Alcatel, and every carrier on earth is issuing a statement about "connecting the next billion." And yet the phone I actually want to hold in my hand isn't at MWC at all. HTC skipped the show entirely and did its own thing back on the 19th, with simultaneous events in New York and London for the HTC One.
That timing wasn't an accident. Announce a week before the biggest mobile trade show of the year and you get a full cycle of coverage all to yourself before Samsung, Nokia, Sony and everyone else start elbowing for attention in the same 48 hours. Smart move, honestly, even if it does feel a little like showing up to a party a week early just so you can leave before it starts.
The UltraPixel thing bugs me, a little
HTC's whole pitch for the One's camera is that it doesn't do more megapixels, it does "UltraPixels" instead — four of them, allegedly, with bigger individual photosites (2.0 microns, paired with an f/2.0 lens) that let in more light than the 8 and 13 megapixel sensors everyone else is shipping. The theory is sound enough; pixel size does matter more than pixel count once you're past a certain resolution, and anyone who's used a point-and-shoot in a dim restaurant knows more megapixels crammed onto a tiny sensor mostly just means more noise. But calling it "UltraPixel" instead of just saying "4 megapixels, bigger pixels, trust us" is exactly the kind of marketing rename that makes me roll my eyes. Just tell me the spec and let me decide if it matters. I don't need a brand name for arithmetic.
That said, the rest of the phone sounds genuinely interesting to me in a way HTC hardware hasn't in a while. The aluminum unibody, the front-facing stereo speakers with actual built-in amps (BoomSound, another name I could live without), the new Sense 5 skin with the BlinkFeed news-tile homescreen instead of the usual widget clutter. I've been carrying an HTC phone for about a year and a half now and the software has always been the weak point, so if BlinkFeed is actually less annoying than what came before, that alone would be worth the upgrade for me.
Meanwhile, actually at MWC
Nokia's Lumia 520 is the story I think matters more long-term, even though it's getting a fraction of the attention. It's a cheap Windows Phone, well under the price of a flagship, aimed at people who'd otherwise buy some no-name Android handset. Windows Phone has never had a real budget play before, and if Nokia can get this thing into carrier stores at an aggressive price, that does more for the platform's numbers than another flagship nobody outside tech blogs will ever buy. The Lumia 720 sits a notch above it with a better camera, but the 520 is the one I'd bet on moving actual units.
And then there's Firefox OS, which I want to be excited about and mostly just feel confused by. The pitch is a phone OS built entirely on web standards, HTML and JavaScript running the whole show, no native app layer at all. Mozilla's lined up a real list of carrier partners for it. I like the idea in principle. I just don't believe regular people are going to choose "runs on web tech" over "runs the apps my friends already have," and app parity is the whole ballgame here. I tried loading the live keynote stream this morning over the wifi at the coffee shop down the street and it buffered so badly I gave up and read the liveblog text instead, which felt like a fittingly 2013 way to follow a mobile conference.
Barcelona's got three more days to go. I'll believe the "MWC changes everything" headlines when I see units in actual stores, not press photos of executives holding phones at arm's length on a stage.