Billed as the world’s biggest conference devoted to mobility and connectivity, Mobile World Congress (MWC) once again took over Barcelona to showcase the latest tech trends for businesses (big and small), governments, and consumers alike.
Nearly 110,000 industry types from 205 countries and territories attended MWC25 from March 3 to 6 – including yours truly – to visit the roughly 2,700 exhibitors and see the more than 1,200 speakers, that focused heavily this year on AI (surprise, surprise), smartphones and accessories, and emerging services to stay connected across the globe.
The following were a few standouts from my vantage point.
World’s thinnest smartphone
At just 5.7mm deep, the Tecno Spark Slim is the world’s thinnest smartphone – even slimmer than a pencil – that surprisingly feels good to hold.
By comparison, an iPhone 16 is about 7.8mm thin.
The back of this Android phone reflects like a mirror because of its stainless steel unibody (and decorative lights that dance around the rear cameras). The Chinese phone maker says there will be a ceramic model, too.
The 6.78-inch device is also super light at just 146 grams – despite its huge 5200mAh battery.
Worth noting, this is even slimmer than the 5.84mm Samsung Edge set to arrive later in 2025. Apple is rumoured to release a slim iPhone 17 Air this fall, too.
No word yet on when Spark Slim will come out, or where, but Tecno primarily sells phones in Africa, the Middle East, India, Latin America and, most recently, Eastern Europe.
Solar-powered laptop
Lenovo is showing its sunny disposition: the aptly-named Yoga Solar PC concept features an integrated solar panel that can convert sunlight into usable energy.
This could be incredibly handy if you’re out and about with nowhere to plug the laptop into a wall for a quick charge. According to the company, about 20 minutes of sunlight could yield roughly an hour of video playback or even more for basic tasks like word processing. Impressive.
Lenovo also showed its ThinkBook Flip at MWC25, an 18.1-inch OLED foldable laptop that transitions from a regular-looking laptop to an extended vertical mode for reading legal-sized documents, for a dual-screen set-up, and other modes.
No glasses needed for this 3D tablet
While ZTE-owned RedMagic isn’t the first company to manufacture a 3D tablet, it’s certainly the best I’ve seen to date.
At first glance, the RedMagic Pad 3D Explorer Edition looks like a regular 12-inch Android tablet, but with the tap of a button it could render still images, videos and games into eye-popping 3D – that doesn’t require glasses – with an amazing effect that makes it look like content is coming out of the screen and onto your lap.
It can deliver this “stereoscopic” visual sensation thanks to a special screen coating and twin cameras on the top of the tablet’s bezel, which focuses on your eyes. It works with virtually any content but looks especially good when it renders images made for 3D viewing.
Under the hood it boasts a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, 12GB of RAM and a 10,000mAh battery.
No word on when this will be available.
Personal bodycam
Keocam bowed the “world’s first personal dashcam,” designed specifically for individual safety and security.
This small (2.1 x 1.9 inches), magnetic and wearable device fuses video recording capabilities with emergency response features.
Captured from your first-person perspective with its 160-degree wide-angle camera, the patented system is said to continuously record in one-minute loops, storing that footage on both the camera and a nearby smartphone (to ensure there are always two copies).
In an emergency, press the button and it saves and uploads the previous and ongoing recordings to the user’s secure cloud, ensuring the evidence is preserved, and can automatically alert designated contacts with video and precise location data.
Keocam will be out later this year for between $129 and $149.
It’s an ‘Honor’
While the massive Chinese brand Honor unveiled impressive new products – like its Honor Earbuds Open that can translate spoken languages between two parties in real time – the tech powerhouse spent most of its energy discussing its ambitious strategy to transform Honor from a device maker to an “open AI ecosystem.”
Called HONOR ALPHA PLAN, this $10 billion USD investment over the next five years looks to fuse artificial intelligence with the human connection (not replace it) and enabling seamless cooperation across different companies and operating systems – while also protecting user privacy.
“I am calling on all of us to unite together to address the myriads of challenges and opportunities of AI technology,” Honor CEO James Li said during his energetic MWC keynote address.
To reinforce this collaboration, Li was joined onstage by Google, Qualcomm, Vodaphone, and others.
Several demos at the booth impressed MWC attendees, such as leveraging AI to “upscale” a 40-year-old blurry photo of a soccer player into a crisp modern-day image. Similarly, Honor demonstrated a photo taken of a building several kilometres away on its latest phone, Honor Magic7Pro, and with the touch of a button it instantly made the faraway image appear much sharper before your eyes. I understand why this phone has the word “Magic” in its name.
On a related note, if you want to remove an unwanted subject in a photo – like a passerby ruining your family shot on a beach – you can verbally instruct the phone by saying something like “remove the guy in the yellow shorts” and the photobomber will disappear. (Google Pixel, Samsung and Apple also let you easily manipulate photos, but here I only had to ask the phone to do it.)
Another cool demo showed a high-resolution photo being shared with nearby phones, including other Android phones and an iPhone. Unlike Apple’s AirDrop, which requires a compatible Apple product, Honor showed how it could instantly and wirelessly share content between competing devices.
Also unveiled at MWC25, the Honor Watch 5 Ultra is a lightweight smartwatch with a classic round face (made with sapphire crystal) and octagonal titanium case, with a battery the company says can last up to 15 days between charges.
– Marc Saltzman is the host of the Tech It Out podcast and the author of the book, Apple Vision Pro For Dummies (Wiley)