Too Big for it’s Own Good

As many of you know, Mobile World Congress, one of the largest and most prestigious tech conventions in the world, is happening next week. It is a spectacle of all the latest and greatest in smartphone development… or at least that’s what it’s supposed to be. You see, MWC has a problem – it’s become so big and so dominant and so loud, in terms of media coverage, that many of the big players avoid it altogether.

LG has already announced their new headlining phone, the LG G Pro 2, which is a phablet designed to compete with the Note series. HTC has said they’ll announce their new HTC One in March, well after the noise has died down. Microsoft and the rest of the Windows Phone ecosystem are skipping MWC and waiting until Microsoft’s BUILD conference. And the biggest fish of all in mobile, Apple, never bothers to turn up.

As a result of all this, MWC has boiled down to a couple of the top Android manufacturers (Samsung, Sony), and companies trying to show they belong, either because of region (Chinese manufacturers ZTE, Xaomi, etc.), or scale (Mozilla, Jolla, Blackphone). All this indicates exactly what MWC has become – a launch event for the very biggest (Samsung Galaxy S5 this time around), with all of the second tier companies avoiding the marketing juggernaut and announcing either early, or late.

The only company that’s really tackling Samsung head on at MWC is Nokia, but rather than do it with a WP8 device, they’re doing it with a bargain basement Android phone, one that’s been heavily customized to strip out all of Google’s services, and replace them with Microsoft and Nokia versions. But even Nokia won’t really go head to head with Samsung, given the vast (over $500) price gulf between their devices.

All of this, then, explains Mobile World Congress in a nutshell – awesome for gadget lovers, but entirely skippable for companies. There’s too much noise, too little signal, and marketing departments are staying away in droves.