Viva Barcelona

Barcelona will be portion up its sixth Mobile World Congress (MWC) this week and it promises as ample accumulation as the tapas bars that the town is more famous for.

Operating systems, content, gadgets and even chips will all be on the menu as the Spanish town plays horde to more than 50,000 visitors.

The guest list will moreover be an heterogeneous blend as mobile old-timers massage shoulders with high-profile management team from outward the sector.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, Google's Eric Schmidt as good Twitter's Dick Costolo and Carol Bartz from Yahoo will all be there.

It represents the continuing impact between the net and mobile communication, as smartphones obtain ever more popular, smarter and more powerful.

Mobile review definite CCS: Insight predicts that smartphones will surpass the number of PCs in the world by 2013.

It could come about even earlier if Gartner's total infer correct. It found that smartphones are already being shipped in larger number than PCs - 100.9 million in the fourth entertain of 2010 compared to 92 million PCs.

The working systems that power them are expected to take centre theatre in Barcelona as the fighting between Google, Apple and Microsoft gears up.

That fighting was done ample more engaging by the Nokia, Microsoft partnership voiced final week.

It will see Nokia spin to Windows as its first working network for smartphones, abandoning the bum Symbian platform.

But Android is still expected to take the MWC climax as unaccepted working network aristocrat - for this year at least.

At past Mobile World Congresses, there has been a outrageous accumulation of not similar handsets on uncover but these days all phones look the same, thinks Ben Wood, an researcher with CCS: Insight.

"Ask a youngster to pull a mobile phone and many will pull the same thing - a black rectangle with a hold screen," he said.

To cancel out this flourishing homogenisation of design, a few operators will be gift quirky new features to help them mount out from the crowd.

LG will be display off its much-leaked 3D handset, the first mobile phone written to perspective 3D calm without the need for glasses.

Gamers will be interested to see if there is declaration of the increasingly deafening rumours about Sony Ericsson's Android-powered games phone the Xperia Play, dubbed the Playstation phone.

And to express only how absolute the chips that run smartphones are becoming, there will be lots of mobile add-ons, such as Motorola's laptop wharf confidante for its Atrix handset, that will enable the phone to run as a P.C. using a laptop shell, dubbed a webtop.

With smartphones pulling the boundary on capacity-squeezed networks, there will be innumerable companies suggesting way to make them more efficient.

There will be lots of fad around 4G, with lots of operators earnest next-generation service even even though many will not technically be 4G.

The air will be thick with acronyms such as LTE (Long Term Evolution), Wimax and HSPA+, and for the interested in the nitty gritty, a large discuss around that of these technologies are obviously 4G.

"The selling around LTE and other flavours has become increasingly impertinent but consumers do not unequivocally caring what it is called," mentioned Steve Hartley, an researcher with Ovum.

LTE at last forthcoming to marketplace will be one of MWC's key trends, and the fact that the US marketplace has embraced it will make for engaging column-inches about Europe personification catch-up.

Increasingly mobile operators will look to tell apart themselves by prioritising or gift giveaway access to renouned services such as Facebook and YouTube, experts think.

"Google could make a remuneration to an user if they so wished, that in spin would enable the user to marketplace their device as one gift the most appropriate experience of YouTube," mentioned Mr Hartley.

Every Mobile World Congress has a buzzword - more frequently than not an acronym - and this year it is expected to be NFC - Near Field Communication.

NFC is the technology that allows mobile phones to be incited in to remuneration devices, replacing credit cards, faithfulness cards, go cards and other vouchers.

"All the applications that use a earthy card can one day or other be eliminated onto the mobile phone," mentioned Phillippe Vallee, from Gemalto, an NFC technology firm.

Paying for tapas might be about to obtain a lot easier.