By guest editor Stephane Delbecque

[Mobile World Congress] We had the opportunity to spend some time with Nicholas Babaian, Product Manager Mobile at Skype to learn more about Skype Mobile products and strategy.

With 400 million web users worldwide, Skype is the definitive leader in VoIP. In order to know more about people’s opinion on the service, they conducted a survey and had the surprise to learn that the #1 request was “make it mobile”. Back to October 07, Skype released the first Skype Phone in the UK with 3, an innovative mobile carrier and got some pretty good success with more than 500,000 phones and 1 million minutes a day. Because data traffic for people with the Skype phone was 20% bigger than an average user, it served as a case study for any mobile carrier aiming at not only acquiring new users but also retaining existing ones.

[Mobile World Congress] Acer is a newcomer in the smartphone world. The company believes that laptops (or Netbooks) and mobile phones will eventually “merge” in some ways and that is the reason why it makes sense for them to go into that market. We have had the opportunity to take a closer look, and at the moment, all these phones are variants of plain-vanilla Windows Mobile phones. They aren’t “bad” by any means, but there’s nothing really remarkable about them. We think that Windows Mobile 6.5 is going to help Acer a lot, as they don’t have a head start like HTC on the software side of things (right now, it’s not clear if these phones are compatible with WM 6.5). We’ll keep an eye on Acer, as this is probably only the beginning…

Acer DX900 Photo Gallery
Acer F900 Photo Gallery
Acer M900 Photo Gallery
Acer X960 Photo Gallery

[Mobile World Congress] This Mobile Internet Device (MID) reference design from Qualcomm is yet another sign that mobile and laptops are getting closer together. As Qualcomm would put it, this is a phone in a super-slim laptop body. In short, you get an ultra-slim design that is truly “instant on” (like a phone) and runs mobile software (Android, for example) – but at the same time, you get the comfort of a laptop when it comes to display and keyboard. The idea is quite frankly not new but it has always crashed on the same wall: it always end up being too expensive. Secondly, do we need to open a $60/mo cellphone account again?

See: Snapdragon platform

[Mobile World Congress] The HTC Touch Diamond 2 was on display at WMC for all to try. The phone’s physical design is excellent and our opinion, this is the best Windows Mobile “body” right now – if you don’t need a physical keyboard. The phone was fairly responsive, and comes pre-installed with Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro. A free WM 6.5 Upgrade will come later. HTC is also pushing hard on the software front, and it has continued to improve the user interface built on top of Windows Mobile’s. If you have played with previous HTC phones, you can notice changed immediately as more interface elements are finger friendly. If you want to check all the details, it’s best to go to the product page. As far as we’re concerned, we like the design of this phone – a lot. However, we will be careful and not recommend it before we have tested it in the field. It will be most interesting to see how HTC integrates its software with WM 6.5. Touch Diamond 2 Product page

[Mobile World Congress] The first generation of iPhones wanabees has not been pretty. Sure, they all had interesting physical designs, but the brains (user interface and applications) was mostly deficient. The user feedback is there to tell the story. With the Arena, LG shows that it can learn from past mistakes (partly caused rushing “touch” products to ride the wave) and improve the user interface significantly.

[Mobile World Congress] Despite the recent “merge” between CyberShot and Walkman into the Sony Ericsson IDOU phone, the company is still making interesting one-trick pony phones (meaning they one strong point, like “photos” or “music”). The Sony Ericsson C903 is a simple camera phone that is good at what it does. Activating the camera is easy and you can record decent-quality video and fair quality photos. The phone also has Assisted GPS, that can be used to geo-tag your photos (remember where they were taken) or help you find your way. The first photos of the C903 appeared about a week ago, and that’s the first time that we have been able to use it.

[Mobile World Congress] Today Yahoo launched its new Yahoo! Mobile service for the mobile web and as an application for the iPhone, for smartphones from Nokia,RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola and for other Windows Mobile devices. The service is available today in beta and general availibility is expected in Q2 2009.

Features include:

• Integrated Opera Mini 4.2
• Search via Yahoo! oneSearch with voice command: it allows users to launch searches simply by speaking the keywords.
• Maps: improved location tools
• Access to email accounts including Gmail, Windows Live, Hotmail and AOL Mail.
• Access to social network accounts including Bebo, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Last.fm, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube
• Access to Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Address Book and Yahoo! Calendar
• Easy access to favorite content: websites, sport, news, RSS feed, weather, stocks and more with Yahoo! onePlace tool
• Widgets for various web services

At first, our instinct is to go for the QWERTY phone, but after playing with the E55 (E55 specs here), we found it to be admittedly a more attractive phone than its sibling the E75. Why? Form factor: the phone is thin and very light despite having brains and a solid construction. The extended numeric pad is definitely not my favorite and we’re now dreaming of an E55 with a full QWERTY keyboard. Nokia told us that they’ve heard that many times. Sure, there’s the E71, but the E55 seems a lot lighter and it probably costs less too!

[Mobile World Congress] At the moment, a really solid piece of plexiglass stands between us and the IDOU from Sony Ericsson, so in the meantime, here are some real-life photos that show you what the device looks like when it’s not rendered by a computer. Does IDOU keep you up at night or would you rather have a smartphone than a multimedia phone? You see what we see – so let us know what you think!

[Mobile World Congress] Walking around Mobile World Congress (WMC) is not as grueling as walking at CES, but still, if you can find a place where it’s possible to see a bunch of stuff from different brands in a 30 meters radius, go for it! We stumbled upon the Intel MID Bar, where one can see MIDs from many brands, but also WiMax related devices. No alcohol involved, sorry, only delicious gadgets.

[Mobile World Congress] In short, Nokia will integrate Skype directly into its phones. This announcement is *huge*, mainly for Skype, but also for Nokia users in general. Skype will be integrated directly in the phones’ contacts so that you can see if your friends are connected through Skype or not. If they are, you can call them over WiFi or 3G. It is also possible to call landlines and other phones from SkypeOut, at a lower cost.

Right now, it looks like carriers won’t have much of a say in this matter, but the first idea that pops in mind is that they could eventually block the Skype Packets if they feel like its damaging their margins – although other ISPs have run into trouble for doing stuff like that. To be fair, we’re only guessing that carriers are in tears.

In any case, it’s great news for users, Skype and Nokia customers.

[Mobile World Congress] Their booth was a little empty, but Windows Mobile expert i-mate had a few interesting prototypes on display. Most don’t even have a name yet, but look for yourself and let us know if you would like these phones to become real products. Search i-mate stories.

Related: take a look at this i-mate phone. We talked about it before WMC, but there’s no sign of it at the show.

[Mobile World Congress] NVIDIA was showing the first devices using its APX processor announced last year at MWC: the Yulong N8 and the IAC S2. They look like “normal” smartphones except that they are graphically incredibly powerful. They were not running, so we suspect that all the kinks have not been worked out.

On the $99 MID front, NVIDIA was using an Eee “shell” to host its Tegra-based plartform (looked like a handheld motherboard in there) to show what tomorrow’s MID could look like. In the photo gallery, you will notice how the power supply wires get into the Eee case. Note that the $99 MID platform does not include 3G, only WiFi.

[Mobile World Congress] I’ve used Windows CE since the first iPaq, then Windows Mobile and until recently, I had observe that not much had changed. Windows Mobile was fundamentally designed to run with a stylus and in our recent reviews, this was a black eye on most Windows Mobile phones. Fortunately, there’s hope: Windows Mobile 6.5 is (almost) here and it has three highlights: a new user interface, Windows Marketplace and MyPhone..