BARCELONA — What a difference a year makes. Maybe.

Nokia was in dire straights this time last year. Having just announced a nearly universal reset of its business and betting its future on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, the company’s future was bleak but at least it had a new plan and operating system that could turn back the tide.

Today, Nokia continues to talk about its strategy and deep partnership with Microsoft, but only one of the two devices introduced here at Mobile World Congress are running on Microsoft’s OS. The other device is the 808 PureView, which features a hard-to-fathom 41-megapixel sensor, Carl Zeiss optics and Nokia’s pixel over-sampling technology. The 808 PureView runs on the latest version of Symbian, a software with a future so narrow that Nokia dumped it (and 3,000 related employees) on Accenture last April. Read more

BARCELONA — Android is growing at “break-neck speed” with 850,000 new devices activated every day, Google’s mobile head Andy Rubin announced in a blog post today. The mobile operating system’s year-over-year growth is now at 250 percent, he added, surpassing 300 million total devices to date.

Today, more than a billion apps are downloaded every month, Rubin continued. And in the 54 weeks that have passed since last year’s Mobile World Congress, the number of apps in the Android Market have tripled to more than 450,000.

The first Android-powered device was released in late October 2008. Since then, more than 800 devices have been launched on the platform. Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will no doubt elaborate on this tremendous growth trajectory when he returns to the MWC stage tomorrow evening.

BARCELONA — To get a sense of how massive Ericsson’s presence is in the mobile industry, consider that half of all smartphone traffic flows through their equipment and services.

The Swedish juggernaut also has a significant jump on its competition with LTE technology, which is growing rapidly in North America and South Korea. Out of more than 325 million LTE subscribers worldwide, Ericsson covers 250 million of those customers. And over the course of 2011, the company’s market share in network infrastructure grew from 32 percent to 38 percent. Read more

BARCELONA — HTC unveiled a trio of new smartphones tonight, marking a new flagship series and the first quad-core device for the Taiwanese company. The One series — X, S and V — is expected to ship in early April, sporting Android 4.0 and the fourth generation of HTC’s Sense user interface.

The HTC One X features Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core chipset, a 4.7-inch display, an 8-megapixel camera and Beats Audio. The HTC One S packs a 4.3-inch display, a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and an 8-megapixel camera in a 7.6mm thin form factor. Finally, the HTC One V features a 3.7-inch display, a 1GHz processor and a 5-megapixel camera.

BARCELONA — Just 11 days after gaining complete control of its smartphone unit through a $1.49 billion deal with Ericsson, the new Sony Mobile Communications rounded out its NXT series portfolio of devices with mid- and lower-tier units, the Xperia P and Xperia U.

“Tonight we are kicking off an inspiring new chapter for our company,” Bert Nordberg, CEO and president of Sony Mobile Communications said here tonight at the onset of a press event.

Extending the design aesthetic of the Xperia S, which was introduced earlier this year and goes on sale this week in Barcelona, the Android-based Xperia P and Xperia U will both launch in the middle of the second quarter, targeting more budget-conscious shoppers. The dual-core 1 GHz processor phones can capture photos in 2D and 3D and both come equipped with Near Field Communications technology. Read more

**As published in RCR Wireless News**

BARCELONA, Spain — In most respects, the dream and even idea of walking by a shop and getting bombarded by mobile advertising is dead. That kind of advertising is spam, no matter how you slice it.

The onus on the mobile advertising community nowadays is to alleviate consumers concerns, whether perceived or real, and deliver more compelling value for brands and customers. Read more

**As published in RCR Wireless News**

BARCELONA, Spain — The availability of enterprise-class features, tools and security is a pervasive concern for virtually ever IT decision maker. While the major smart phone operating systems are adding some of these to their arsenal, there are many others that are being left out of the mix.

While some device manufacturers are largely leaving this task to the OS providers, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is introducing a suite of new enterprise features to their forthcoming Galaxy S II and other Android OS devices coming down the line.

“Up to 30% of smart phone usage today already occurs in the enterprise space and that trend is growing fast,” said Eric Moon, director of Samsung’s enterprise solutions. Read more

**As published in RCR Wireless News**

BARCELONA – “Any piece of content should be playable within five seconds.” That’s the goal Spotify is after with its hugely popular music service that barely anyone outside of Europe has ever heard of, CEO and Founder Daniel Ek said during a keynote.

In his elevator pitch, Ek described Spotify as an iTunes-like experience that allows users to access all of the world’s music.

The two-tiered platform is broken up into a free, ad-supported model and a premium model that allows users to access and cache their entire music library on their mobile device. Based on the latest exchange rates, the premium service costs $13.60 in Spain, France, Sweden, Norway and Finland; and $15.68 in the United Kingdom. For that price, users can download as many songs as they want every month. Read more

**As published in RCR Wireless News**

BARCELONA – As BBC’s director of future media and technology announced the broadcaster’s latest plans for the mobile platform he did, frankly, what more media outlets should do: took the industry to task for its increasingly fragmented approach to content.

“We find it rather strange that the burden falls on us to reformat and repurpose our programming and content for every other platform and every device that comes out every six months,” Erik Huggers said in a brief keynote at Mobile World Congress. “Is it really necessary for us to have that fragmented of a market? Do we really all need our own app store?” Read more

**As published in RCR Wireless News**

BARCELONA – In India today there are 500 million wireless subscribers spanning across 14 operators. Bharti Airtel, the third largest single-country operator in the world, controls a 30% market share with more than 120 million of those customers and 1.9 million retail locations.

The company’s CEO Sanjay Kapoor took his turn on the keynote stage this morning to offer examples of the carrier’s push into mobile content and explain how a penny-per-minute model and ARPU of $2 to $3 is rapidly changing the carrier’s user base.

With 560 million youths, 700 million people living rural areas and 70% of the population not having a bank account, Kapoor and his team are vying to leverage every partnership and asset possible to differentiate the operator’s services offering and continue to deliver incredible growth numbers. Read more