The IT Pro Podcast: The best bits of MWC 2022

MWC is back; after a few years in hibernation, the trade show has once again opened its doors to the mobile industry, with thousands of exhibitors and attendees flocking to Barcelona to check out the latest products and technologies.

This year’s show saw everything from new laptops and smartphones, to developments in network infrastructure and wireless standards. Bobby Hellard and Sabina Weston join us this week to share some of the most interesting things they saw at the show, including Qualcomm’s first Wi-Fi 7 chip, a new all-in-one from Huawei, and a charger that can fill your phone up in just a few minutes.

Highlights

“Size wise, it's nowhere near as big as what it was in 2019. I'm not sure on the attendance figures, but there was a lot less than what it was before the pandemic. And we just had more virtual presentations. So companies like Realme and Lenovo, they chose to give us video showcases but they didn't actually attend. So that's completely different from 2019. Lenovo had one of the biggest stands in 2019, but they had no presence this year.”

“Nowadays, we mostly see Wi-Fi 6, in plenty of new offerings. And Wi-Fi 7 isn't considered very mainstream; in fact, it's only been properly announced last year. So I found it extremely surprising that Qualcomm is now rolling out the world's first Wi-Fi 7 chip, which basically is in its sampling stage. Now the technology is available, but we'll see it in devices in the second half of this year. It's going to offer very low latency of less than two milliseconds and the peak speeds of 5.8 gigabits per second will help power use cases in the metaverse and in extended reality, which was very big this year.”

“Interestingly enough, the best device on show was not a handset or a laptop, it was actually a charger. So this also fits into the narrative of those that weren't there and those that were there, because in the morning on Monday, Realme introduced an Ultra Dart Charger. It's 150 Watt, boom, charges your phone, five minutes, 50% full. But by the afternoon, that had been doubled, I think, or almost doubled, by Oppo with their prototype for a Super VOOC charger, 240 Watts, which charges the phone in nine minutes from zero to full.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

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