The Mobile World Conference was held this year in Barcelona, Spain and featured mobile phone innovativeness as the main point of attraction. Yet, on top of the mobile devices we have the latest application from Viewdle for smartphone. The facial recognition tool from Viewdle would attempt to smart-tag a user’s photos before they uploaded them to sites like Facebook by scanning the images, discovering faces, and then using facial recognition to identify the people in them.

An important issue addressed by smartphone manufacturers was price, as T-Mobile launched a cheap alternative to current smartphone devices. There is a possibility that T-Mobile released these products as a reaction to rumours of Apple designing iPhone Nano for a reasonable price. In the first part of this year, both T-Mobile Move and Samsung Galaxy Mini will be found at retailers at the price of $50-$75 on a two-year contract, with the mention that T-Mobile Move will be launched in Europe in May and afterwards in the US. T-Mobile Move and Samsung Galaxy Mini are running on Android 2.2 .

Acer also released an Android 2.3 smartphone, called the Acer Iconia Smart, emphasizing the Android trend in the mobile sphere. At the Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Erci Schmidt announced the new Android OS version, a combination of Gingerbread and Honeycomb:

Today I’ll use the commonly used names. We have OS called gingerbread for phones, we have an OS being previewed now for tablets called Honeycomb. The two of them… you can imagine the follow up will start with an I, be named after dessert, and will combine these two. (…) A future for the masses not the elites; 2 billion people will enter our conversation who we’ve never heard from will enter our conversation in the next year. (…)