Microsoft just announced at the 2008 Mobile World Congress that it will be acquiring Danger Inc., the company who created and supports the popular Sidekick range of handhelds offered by T-Mobile. Microsoft’s current mobile offering, Windows Mobile 6 (both Professional and Standard) is often slammed for being too ‘businessy’, with a bigger focus on the enterprise user and not enough multimedia/consumer-friendly features.

This makes total sense to me. Microsoft’s OS currently sucks for consumers, compared to multimedia- and consumer-friendly Symbian OS and more recently, RIM’s Blackberry OS and the iPhone. Rather than attempt to overhaul their OS, which is rumored to not be updated fully until 2009, they’re simply going to buy Yahoo! and Danger, both top-level for mobile consumer-friendly services and products.

Genius. Completely genius. Just hope they don’t screw it up.

It’s no wonder Motorola’s mobile phone business is in the toilet isn’t doing well. Here we are at the biggest mobile phone event of the year, the 2008 Mobile World Congress. Sony Ericsson dropped 7 handsets on us last night, including the X1, with Windows Mobile (a first for SE) and stinkin quad-band HSDPA support, among the other rockin handsets.

Nokia hits the stage with the N96, which has every feature I can possibly think of, crammed into a rather small and sexy package. There’s a few other hits from Nokia, including 2 models with US 3G versions announced. Nice.

Motorola brought their ‘A’ game apparently, rocking the W161 and W181, two new candybar handsets. The W161 rocks a ‘large’ 128×128 pixel resolution MONOCHROME display and, well, that’s about it. Oh, and FM radio. Can’t forget that. The W181 upgrades that display to a 65k color…128 x 128 pixel resolution display. Oh, and FM radio. Hmmm, what else you got Moto? Is that a new slider?

Nope, it’s the same old Z6, only with WiFi added. Cool. That’s all you got? What, no new version of the RAZR?

Sure makes us Americans look cool, thanks Motorola. Thanks for representing us in the Mobile arena. Um, Carl? Icahn you come help them, PLEASE?

Big Red is going all web 2.0 on our asses with the launch of their Mobile World Congress blog. This is very encouraging. The media relations team appear to be getting more and more comfortable with the medium of blogging.

Here’s the announcement from Vodafone:

For the first time Vodafone will be running a dedicated Congress blog. Led by the Vodafone Group Media Relations team, the blog will contain running commentary, interviews with senior Vodafone executives and videos of key events at Congress. The URL for the Congress blog is www.vodafone.com/barcelonablog

This is excellent, excellent work. They’re even using a Nokia N95 to do some mobile video interviews.

I only have one criticism: Individuality.

The chap who’s introducing and presenting the videos does a brilliant job of coming across friendly, adept, experienced and enthusiastic. Here he is:

Alas, I never caught his name. Not once. And the post was published by the phenomenally anonymous ‘Vodafone Team’.

I recognise that in this kind of medium, the PR and marketing professionals go absolutely nuts with worry — because they’re used to producing anonymous (dare I say, bland?) ‘media’ — posters, adverts, flyers… but when it comes to blogging, I think it’s nigh on impossible to do well, as a ‘company’. You need personality. You need ownership. I want to write to the guy and say well done, and tell him that I’m looking forward to his next post or video. But I can’t. I’ll post a comment instead!

So, top work Vodafone! Leading the way, especially when Hutchison (3UK) shut down their X-Series blog the other week because they couldn’t be arsed. Kudos to the Big Red. We’ll be following.

Oh, and one other tiny criticism for the Media Relations team: I’d have posted the videos here, if you’d allowed me to. That’d have widened the audience by about 200,000. How about an embed link? I could obviously cut and paste the source code but you never know how a multi billion pound company will react to you doing that when it’s not explicit and especially when it’s all copyrighted. Screenshots are covered by the fair use provisions but I don’t know about videos…

If you’re in Barcelona this year, you can expect to see number of players battling it out to show you working examples of LTE technology, from the network to the devices.

Motorola will be showcasing online racing car games played over LTE, as well as LTE enabled VoIP calls. Freescale will also be demonstrating HD over LTE using its processors, and is already delivering data rates of 96Mbps downlink and 86Mbps. It’s also betting higher speeds are on the way as soon as the standard matures. Meanwhile, according to a couple of reports, Ericsson will be making what it calls the “world’s first call” on a handheld device using LTE.

While it’s great to hear about all the raw speeds LTE will make possible, it’s the applications that will really make this 3G successor exciting. All suggestions welcome on what will be the killer app for LTE.

Standby for an avalanche of updates. We’ve added a special Mobile World Congress category for event related news. We’ll have some diaries from executives on the site (If you’re going along and you’d like to send us a report, please do so — just mail me) and we’ll have a heck of a lot of news releases and perspective.

Despite the organisers’ less than enlightened attitude to bloggers at last year’s 3GSM, absolutely everyone who’s ever put keyboard to Wordpress is off to the newly re-christened GSMA Mobile World Congress this year. Except me. I have to stay here and work.

Humph.

Still, the mobile news will be pouring out of Barcelona like un-released Nokia product specs from a German website so here’s a quick round up of a few of the major themes and products that we’re likely to see this year.

The handset manufacturers:

Nokia will probably only announce a couple of handsets as they have other S60-fish to fry this year, so we may see an N96 (the next increment of the N95 line) and possibly the E71 (an E61i successor). An N78 (replacing the N73) and an E66 (an E65 replacement) have also been rumoured.

SonyEricsson have hit the ground running and already announced a pile of handsets that develop ther range with G-series ‘touch-screen organisers’, splash resistant and GPS-enabled C-series camera-phones, W-series high-capacity Walkman-phones, Z-series web and e-mail phones. Much of the coverage, though, will go on the attention-grabbing X1 - a new Windows Mobile-based touch screen and QWERTY keyboard web / multimedia device that is going to make you very happy if you got the phrase ‘QWERTY iPhone’ in the MWC buzzword-bingo draw. For the first live pictures see here.

Motorola have hinted at mobile TV-related launches, but little else.

LG has already launched a high-spec Symbian QWERTY device, possibly a Nokia E90 competitor, but so far have forgotten to release any pictures of it.

Samsung are bringing an additional mini-touch screen for navigation to their existing small form-factor slider handset range and may also be launching a premium, high-spec, Symbian-based N95 competitor.

Modu will also unveil their tediously over-trailed mini-phone thing with ‘jackets’ for differing functions. We generally try to keep the tone fairly positive round here, but can I be the first to say that if this is innovation the world’s gone mad. An easy way to access you phone’s data contents or access mobile data? Bluetooth. Welcome to the 1990’s.

New technologies and first looks:

S60 will give more details on its ‘Touch’ user interface for Symbian phones with a Nokia demo and more details on support for a wider range of sensors for movement and orientation.

Android, Google’s entry into the mobile OS world, will be demonstrated for the first time publicly on a prototype device from ARM. We may also hear more details on possible enterprise uses from the likes of Cisco.

Femtocells will be everywhere with Motorola and Netgear demoing 3G femtocells, demonstrations of up to 3.5G cells connected only to ADSL and products intended for consumer residential use. A GSM ‘in a box’ solution that takes 5 minutes to deploy will also be demoed.

Full web browsing on mobile devices will als obe a hot-topic with Opera making their new 9.5 release mobile browser available for the first time. Nokia too will be updating the native S60 browser, promising a more ‘full web’ experience.

Trends:

Microsoft could well be everywhere as they make eyes at Nokia, launch handsets with SonyEricsson and the continuing Yahoo saga unfolds after what seems the now-inevitable rejection by Yahoo’s board of their offer.

Britain will be well reprented with 150 firms attending - the largest number from one country.

Location services will stay in the limelight with richer mapping / location guides and ‘pedestrian modes’ being common themes. The Nokia Maps beta release features updates in both these areas and Navteq has announced location guides and information for pedestrians (including public transport). Improved location sensing via A-GPS (or something better) will also feature as will WiFi-based location sensing and location-based social networking.

For more reading take a look at the predictions made by the Head of O2’s R&D lab to Mobile Today. And finally… if you damage your phones a lot take a look at a tough phone with a serious guarantee.

Oh yeah and Whatley’s there with SpinVox so watch out for ‘news from the front’ from him if he can drag himself away from the free tapas… Humph.

Left: The famous Gaudi-designed Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona - under construction for almost 150 years, but it will be nice when it’s finished…

Nokia are doing a N-Series launch event at Mobile World Congress — and WOM World are putting on a virtual version, here. It starts in 38 hours… or at 1020am GMT.

(That’s 2am San Francisco time, in case anyone’s counting).

Save this bookmark (or revisit here on Monday morning) for all the Nokia Mobile World Congress glory.

Here’s the schedule: