On February 25-28, 2013, the 2013 GSMA Mobile World Congress took place at Fira Gran Via, in Barcelona, Spain. The GSMA Mobile World Congress is a combination of the world's largest exhibition for the mobile industry and a conference featuring prominent executives representing mobile operators, device manufacturers, technology providers, vendors and content owners from across the world. Here is a summary of what we found the most interesting news, launches and events of the mobile event of the year.

Nokia focused on mass market, presenting 4 new devices, one of which will cost only 15€: the Nokia 105. This amazingly cheap new phone has a battery that lasts for a month, and it is one of the many new smartphones that are to appear at affordable prices for developing markets. It was presented along with Nokia’s mid-range Lumia 720 and Lumia 520, and good news kept coming their way as Asha 305 won the ‘Best Feature or Entry Level Phone’ award in the GSMA Global Mobile Awards.

But Nokia wasn’t the only one at this Mobile World Congress that promoted the creation of affordable handsets. Other companies like Bharti Airtel, Mozilla and Qtel also discussed the challenges of getting internet access to the rest of the world.

Duracell presented Powermat, a new wireless mobile charger that promises to be the future of mobile device charging. Onbile interviewed Scott Eisenstein, who explained to us how this revolutionary charger works and how they are planning to commercialize it.

Mobile OS’s world was also shaken as new releases for 2013 were announced; but probably the most appealing one was Mozilla’s Firefox OS, which closed the MWC with agreements with no less than 17 operators to support this open web initiative, which is soon to be launched commercially on a series of devices manufactured by Alcatel, ZTE and Huawei. However, this is not the only new mobile OS that was presented at the MWC: Tizen was also there and announced that NTT Docomo, Orange and Samsung were all planning on launching phones that will run on this OS by the end of the year.

Samsung announced that they would not be presenting the new Galaxy S4 at the MWC, but at a separate event that will take place next month in New York. However, they did present the Galaxy Note 8 tablet.

Fujitsu also presented a new phone at the Mobile World Congress. Teamed up with France Telecom-Orange, they introduced the Stylistic S01, a smartphone aimed at an older range of people than your average smartphone and with some very interesting features.

Opera‘s contribution to the Mobile World Congress was a new mobile web browser for Android, completely redesigned by the Norwegian company to improve its interface and performance.

ZTE present its Grand Memo, a 5.7″ phone with a Snapdragon 800 processor, which makes it the first smartphone in the world to feature that Qualcomm chip. A dolby digital plus sound is another one of the amazing features of this new smartphone.

Although Huawei announced many news for the starting year, they certainly did not disappoint us by presenting its 4G LTE Ascend P2, the world’s fastest smartphone. With a 4.7″ display, a quad-core 1.5GHz processor and 1GB RAM, according to Huawei it can reach a download speed of up to 150Mbps (network willing).

Sony‘s Xperia Tablet Z was another one of the launches at MWC 2013, and probably the most appealing feature of this new tablet is that it is waterproof. Thin and light (only 6.9 millimeters and 495g, which makes it the world’s thinnest and lightest tablet), it still solid enough to give you the right feel when using it.

Asus also presented two new smartphones and a tablet - PadFone 2 and PadFone Infinity and, especially, the FonePad. The first two ones are a 4.7″ and a 5″ smartphones, that both come with a 10.1″ tablet body which the phone docks into for a bigger display; the latest one is a 7″ tablet which resembles the impressive Google Nexus 7 tablet, only with an Intel CPU instead of the Nexus’s Nvidia.

Among other news, Seattle-based company Arbiquity announced an partnership with China Unicom to provide connected vehicle services for the Chinese auto market. They plan to offer services that include smartphone and infotainment integration, CRM, commercial vehicle fleet services, as well as other telematic services.

Randall Stephenson, Chairman, President and CEO of AT&T strongly believes that LTE and the cloud are going to be key players in this new mobile era and, in his words, “we’re still early, but this has already proven to be probably one of the most powerful technological combinations that we have seen”. Other companies, like Bharti Airtel and China Mobile agree with this, and are currently developing its implementation.

Other hot issues of this Mobile World Congress include Telco-OTT and M2M communications, both uprising technologies that must be taken into account and which will undoubtedly be the future of the mobile industry.

Members of the Regional Branch «Information and Telecommunication Technologies» of RAEN V. Tihvinskiy, S.Portnoy, V. Arhipkin, S. Terentev and a foreign member J. Golovatchev (Detecon Consulting/ Deutsche Telekom Group, Bonn, Germany) with support of LLC «Icominvest», Ciclo company and «T-Comm» media publisher participated in the Mobile World Congress 2013. The concise text of the report can be found on the RANS ITT web-site (www.raenitt.ru) in “Publications” section.