The annual Mobile World Congress is underway in Barcelona, but we've already got a bunch of interesting announcements, concept products, and unusual designs to talk about.
MWC is more about business than launching new products-peek behind the huge big-name show-floor booths, and you'll see even more space taken up with meeting rooms and corporate hospitality-but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of cool announcements, too, from the rebirth of Nokia as HMD, celebrated with (what else?) a Barbie phone, a crazy see-through laptop from Lenovo, and Samsung's smart ring. Oh, and AI. Lots and lots of AI.
Life In Plastic, It's Fantastic
Let's start with the Barbie phone from Human Mobile Devices, née HMD, née Nokia. It's a pink flip-style retro feature phone that will be launching this summer. It's kind of a weird choice for a company that seems to be trying to distance itself from the once-amazing Nokia brand, which has become associated with cheap, non-smartphones in recent years.
It's also maybe the latest brand tie-in ever-when it launches, it'll be around a year since the Barbie movie came out. Unfortunately, the only images shared by HMD were pink pixellated rectangles.
Clear Future
Equally fanciful and probably just as practical is Lenovo's new transparent laptop. In person, it's really impressive. At an off-site Lenovo launch event in Barcelona, the ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop Concept was by far the biggest draw, and it's easy to see why. The 17-inch screen looks like a clear block of perspex or glass; only it lights up just like a screen. You can see clean through to the desk behind it, and anyone standing on that side can read and view anything on the display.
The transparent screen is coupled with an equally impractical touch keyboard, and a dark glass slab, which can also be used as a tablet for a pen. It's hard to see how this setup would ever be useful as a regular laptop, but it's also easy to see how it could be used for in-store displays, fancy hotel self-check-in desks, boutique shopping mall info terminals, and so on. It just looks really cool.
Repairability
Another trend is repairability, which is finally gaining traction among the big manufacturers. Lenovo (again) showed off the next generation of its standard business laptop, the T14 (gen 5). Thanks to an ongoing consultation with iFixit, Lenovo has managed to improve the T14's repairability score from an already good 7/10 to an excellent 9/10.
You can remove the entire keyboard assembly with two screws swap in a new battery just by taking off the bottom cover and removing two more captive screws; and you also have better access to the trackpad assembly and can easily replace RAM, the SSD, and even replace the USB and Ethernet ports using just a screwdriver. Full disclosure: I spent the weekend helping iFixit to demonstrate these new repair features. I was paid by iFixit, not Lenovo.
Ring Cycle
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is a wearable piece of smart jewelry that totally exists and was shown to journalists at Samsung's off-site event over the weekend. We know that it will come in 13 sizes, in gold, platinum, and black, and that it has a bunch of sensors packed into its inner surface. What we still don't know is what those sensors will do, how much it will cost, etc. At the moment, it seems more like a concept design than a product, but smart rings are definitely a neat idea.
AI Everywhere
The biggest trend at MWC, though, just like everywhere else, is AI. It can be seen running locally on offline laptops, and it can be seen in Google's Gemini chatbot, which is the new name for Bard.
Despite the number of demos, AI still doesn't really seem to have found a purpose. It can be used to make your emails longer and to summarize long emails to make them easier to read. It can, of course, generate imagery for those corporate PowerPoint presentations, and it could presumably read the slides from that same PowerPoint presentation out loud, sending all viewers into a slumber.
The demos are fun and sometimes impressive, but they also contain quite a contradiction. While companies are moving to make their devices more repairable to limit waste and comply with incoming EU laws, AI is over there causing a new environmental disaster thanks to its incredible thirst for power to juice all those AI data centers, which require an order of magnitude more electricity than the simple cloud-storage data centers we're used to.
Tech trends come and go, and MWC is a nice yearly view into what lasts and what doesn't. For years and years, Bluetooth was always the next big thing and now look at it. It made it. Repairability is now reaching critical mass, both in terms of legislation and as a way for manufacturers to differentiate themselves, so that looks like a solid future win. But AI? Right now, it's still pretty useless and consumes way more power than the planet can afford. Perhaps it will eventually succeed like Bluetooth, or maybe it will go the way of crypto and NFCs. Maybe next year, we'll find out.
About the author: Charlie Sorrel has been writing about technology, and its effects on society and the planet, for almost two decades. Previously, you could find him at Wired's Gadget Lab, Fast Company's CoExist, Cult of Mac, and Mac Stories. He also writes for his own site, StraightNoFilter.com, Lifewire Tech News, and iFixit.
