25 February 2015, 1100
It's another day at MWC2014, and everybody is queing up to offer their opinion on Samsung's new flagship handset, the Galaxy S5. Not only at the expo in Spain itself, but around the world on social networks too.
In the business realm, PayPal and Samsung announced that they are teaming up to let shoppers buy goods using the Galaxy S5's fingerprint scanner. The online merchant has been swift to get into bed with Samsung and is the first global payment company to support the South-Korea-based company's biometrics technology.
Meanwhile, BlackBerry has taken the wrappings off BES12, the latest version of the Canadian handset maker's BlackBerry Enterprise Service. According to the company, it will allow organisations to create
"enterprise-grade" applications for use on the company's mobile devices.
24 February 2014, 1800
We briefly played with Fujitsu's just announced prototype haptic sensory tablet. In a nutshell, it uses ultrasonic vibration to convey tactile sensations by altering the friction coefficient between the touchscreen display and the user's finger.
You can actually use more than one finger if you want to and we found out that the haptic effect is binary (i.e. you don't get gradual changes in the vibration frequency to mimic changing textures.
The trigger area as well is not totally accurate; for example, the edge between smooth and rough areas doesn't match the vibrations and obviously, the effect applies only to pictures for the time being.
We tried a number of demos on one of the prototype tablets but although they are gimmicky at the moment, haptic does have many applications in the real world especially for old people, people with poor eye-sight and blind people.
24 February 2014, 1600
Meanwhile, Mediatek outed its first 64-bit LTE SoC, the MT6732, which is slated for launch later this year - possibly during the last quarter. Clocked at 1.5GHz the SoC will have four cores and will be around the same as the Cortex-A9, performance-wise.
HP took the opportunity to launch new business tablets at MWC 2014, including the HP ElitePad 1000, a 64-bit Windows 8.1 device with a 10.1-inch widescreen WUXGA multi-touch display.
The company's thinnest tablet to date measuring just 9.2mm, the tablet has been outed with a number of enterprise features in tow, including a fingerprint reader, HP Client Management, Client Security, and an optional Security Smart Jacket with multi-factor authentication.
In the storage space, SanDisk launched what it claims is the world's smallest microSDXC card to offer 128GB capacity. Using proprietary technology, the company has crammed in more than a thousand times more storage capacity than the microSD card format that was launched in 2004.
24 February 2014, 1345
Our day started on a bang with a number of key announcements from Intel who has unveiled two new processor families part of the Atom Range, Merrifield and Moorefield, both based on the Silvermont architecture.
Devices from Lenovo, Asus, Dell and Foxconn are expected to appear very soon on the market with nearly 80 design wins for tablets alone. The company also introduced a new LTE-Advanced modem that can reach up to 300Mbps download speeds.
23 February 2014, 2120
A long and exhausting day comes to an end. Sundays have never been so fun. Went to meet Mediatek ahead of a busy week for them with a couple of key announcements. That was followed by a trip to the Fira Gran Via to collect my MWC badge and witness how mighty Samsung was. The vicinity of the main building is kitted in such a way that you'd think MWC was just a big Samsung event.
The next trip was to Pepcom's Mobile Focus Global where dozens of big and smaller companies get to show their gears ahead of the official start of MWC. We met up with HP which has announced new phablets for EMEA market plus a mainstream convertible laptop, ZTE, Salesforce, Newegg (who confirmed that it will coming to the UK).
