Mobile World Congress shows us the best and wackiest new ideas in mobile tech every year, with a side of jamón and “Oh, shit, was that the king of Spain who just walked by?” It’s a real trip. But this year’s conference was a mix of unusually odd oddities, including phone camera concepts I swear we tried 15 years ago to screens you can bend every which way.
The phones themselves were predictable, and, often, predictably good. It was everything else in the margins that was weird: phones with weird back panels, things you put on your phone, or just really cool phone-adjacent screens.
Every trade show has a main character. A Most In Show. At CES, it was anything Jensen Huang was doing. At MWC, it was the Xiaomi 15 Ultra. There is nothing surprising about this phone, which is to say that it’s a camera with a phone attached and the camera is a little better this year. But this time, Xiaomi addressed one of mobile photography’s persistent problem children: middling telephoto cameras.
While the sensors behind main cameras have gotten bigger and more capable over the past few years, telephoto cameras have been stuck with smaller sensors that behave well in good light but fall apart when it’s dim. The 15 Ultra adds a bigger, 200-megapixel periscope camera to the phone’s already impressive array of camera hardware, and it’s really good. I had many conversations with my fellow nerds and journalists about how good it is, and it stands out to me as one of the most impressive practical achievements at the show.
The Nothing Phone 3A and 3A Pro were ubiquitous, too, even though they were only announced partway through the day on Tuesday. There wasn’t much left to guess about them because of a string of leaks and marketing teasers, but they come with an AI-powered feature called the Essential Space that’s actually worth your time. It’s a place for voice memos, screenshots, and bits of digital info that otherwise get lost in the camera gallery — and it all gets indexed by AI. Most of all, these phones represent a sharper, more focused vision from Nothing and more substance to go with the brand’s strong style. What we saw at MWC gives me hope that we’ll see more appealing stuff from the company later this year.
That’s a representative sample of the phones at the show: good but not surprising. The oddities came in the margins. Phones might be boring, but what if the back of your phone changed color? What if it was an E Ink display? Or held a solar panel that could charge your phone? What if it was loud — not loud as in style but actually loud? My favorite weird thing of the show was Tecno’s sustainable concept that used coffee grounds in a way I don’t fully understand but actually smelled like coffee.
There were also a lot of weird ideas going around about what you can put on your phone. Realme and Xiaomi both had concepts for big camera lenses that attach to the back of your phone, which I thought we were done trying to do, like, 12 years ago. Infinix had a concept for a phone case that uses solar power to charge your phone, though you obviously would need a specialized phone to work with it. HMD introduced a pair of wireless earbuds with a case that doubles as a magnetic power bank for the back of your phone.
Some of the best oddities of all weren’t even phones. Samsung Display had a folding handheld gaming concept that was not a Switch but was definitely a Switch. Its briefcase screen was fun, too — imagine opening it up to show a picture of bundled cash on the screen! Just a free idea. And Lenovo had a bunch of new ideas about how many times a laptop can fold; if you thought the answer was “once,” you might be surprised.
More than anything, this year’s MWC was a reminder that even though phones may seem boring now, there’s still some room to have fun. And even the boring updates are pretty good ones: foldables are slimmer than ever, there’s a consumer phone with a great telephoto camera on it, and AI features might even live up to the promise of saving us time someday soon. That’s not nothing (I mean, except for Nothing). But for the record, I do still want a Switch that folds. And maybe a phone that smells like coffee, too.
