From February 26 to March 2, Numerama traveled to Barcelona to cover the Mobile World Congress. There, not all the innovations impressed us.
After a small committee CES in Las Vegas, the city of Barcelona has managed the feat of organizing the first real show since the start of the pandemic. From February 26 to March 2, Numerama traveled to the land of tapas to cover the Mobile World Congress, the global event dedicated to mobile technologies. For several days, we have offered you dozens of publications on social networkson our site and through various videos, in order to make you experience the event as well as possible.
After having offered you a first article on our favorites of the show, now place disappointments. The word is strong and not always representative of our state of mind, but you get the idea. Here are five things we regretted at Barcelona.
Xiaomi’s robot dog
As in any high-tech living room, we come across gadgets. Passing by the Xiaomi stand, we were immediately attracted by the CyberDog, a robot dog presented in China a few months ago. Unfortunately, we expected much better. This replica of the Boston Dynamics robots can do almost nothing and was mainly there to attract visitors to the Xiaomi stand. It worked, but we don’t want to adopt one.
The metaverse is everywhere
Made fashionable by Facebook and its name change, the metaverse was everywhere at MWC. Unsurprisingly, not many people have grasped its real interest. We could see the word“metaverse” written in giant on a good hundred stands, even when the technology put forward had nothing to do (roller coasters in virtual reality for example, or a dance class). In short, contrary to what we might think at first glance, the metaverse was not present at all at Mobile World Congress. Even if some want us to believe otherwise.
5G is still looking to impress
Available in France for more than a year, 5G is still struggling to convince. You might think it is now “banal”, but the operators continue to do everything to highlight it on their stands. For example, we were able to see a bartender piloted using 5G, which is supposed to illustrate the incredible capabilities of technology for remote control. After several months of use, hard to be fooled. 5G, at least in its current form, is not the announced revolution. It will probably be better in 3-4 years from now, but isn’t it problematic to see demonstrations that are so out of step with reality?
Prototypes too prototypes
At TCL, we were able to try out very conceptual products. Some have screens that fold in all directions, others only work during the day… In themselves, the Chinese manufacturer’s proposals are quite impressive. However, none of the prototypes put forward were really finished. One was half broken (one end of the screen was coming off), the other couldn’t unfold… This illustrates a bigger trend of living rooms. Can a non-functional prototype be presented as a real novelty?
Less madness than before
More generally, we noticed that manufacturers were more cautious during this 2022 edition. Where are the smartphones with giant batteries? Smartphones capable of turning into drones? What we love about trade shows is also the craziness of ads. At Barcelona this year, there was nothing completely wacky or bizarre. We inevitably regret it, but we imagine that the Covid has something to do with it.
As a reminder, Numerama also offers you a more positive assessment of the Mobile World Congress 2022, with its selection of the most successful new features!
