There were over 1,300 companies exhibiting at the MWC show this year.

T&A/VIEWPOINT: The Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2010, held in Barcelona, Spain from February 15-18, has seen announcements, unveiling, keynotes and demonstrations that range from the extravagant, opulent, low-key to the controversial, humorous and head shaking-inducing resignation.

The annual event, held at the Fira de Barcelona, sees players from the mobile and networking industry converge across 8 different halls, showing latest mobile devices, networking equipment and negotiate roundtable talks.

Our peers at Singapore’s HardwareZone.com have put up coverage of the showfloor announcements from various key players over the last few days.

You can read about them here (Samsung), here (Sony Ericsson), here (Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 series) and here (general showfloor coverage).

Not only that, Nokia and Intel held a press conference announcing the merging of two of their respective platforms (Maemo and Moblin) into one called MeeGo. While Intel pointed out that MeeGo is not strictly a Nokia only platform, the announcement does pave the way for tighter integration of future Linux-based Nokia devices with Intel’s mobile chipset and platform initiatives.

We’re in the process of compiling videos of the event at the moment. Look out for them very soon. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 22/02/2010: Finally, we’ve got both our MWC videos up online. We’ve split our video coverage into two parts.

MWC 2010 Phone Demo Walkthrough - Part 1 of 2
Part 1 highlights phone demos of the Samsung Wave, its app store, the Sony Ericsson trio of phones and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 series.

MWC 2010 Phone Demo Walkthrough - Part 2 of 2
Part 2 of our MWC 2010 video coverage covers Garmin-ASUS nuvifone A50, the NTT DoCoMo Separable Phone, Motorola BACKFLIP, a phone by sports apparel Puma and HTC’s trio of phones — the Legend, Desire and HD mini.

SHOWCASE: One of our intrepid journalists from HWM Singapore travelled to Barca on the pretense of covering MWC but mainly to grab some Lionel Messi T-shirts (we’re kidding). Anyway, the trade show on mobile phones, OSes and apps has just ended and the coverage will be appearing in HWM Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines. Of course, if you can’t wait, hop on over to HardwareZone.com for in-depth coverage on the gadgets. Mobile World Congress 2009 was held 16-19 February 2009 and featured some amazing new phones, announcements, updates and developments.

Windows Mobile 6.5 sports a honeycomb-shaped layout for the Start screen to ease user access to various apps.

Among the highlights of the show was Microsoft’s update to Windows Mobile 6.5, which includes a refreshed Start screen, new Internet Explorer Mobile Browser and the new My Phone service - which allows WinMo users to harmonize all of their online content on their phone (similar to Apple’s MobileMe service). Another highlight was the new HTC Touch Diamond 2, which touts 50% more battery life, Zoom bar and a 5-megapixel auto-focus camera.

Samsung followed up their SOUL launch last year with the UltraTOUCH, a 2.8-inch AMOLED full touch screen phone. At 12.7mm thin, it sports an 8-megapixel camera (Samsung’s 3rd phone with an 8-mega after Innov8 and Pixon) and dual-power LED flash.

Not to be outdone, Nokia’s jumped on the 8-mega bandwagon with the Nokia N86. While sporting a smaller screen at 2.6-inch, it utilizes OLED as well, with dual sliding form factor (similar to N96 and N85), two keys for zooming, 8GB onboard and an expansion slot for a 16GB microSD.

Sony Ericsson upped the ante with a 12.1-megapixel phone called the Idou (pronounced as ‘I do’), which comes with a Xenon flash and intuitive touch features.

For a quick glance of the key phones mentioned, check out our Showcase Gallery after the jump. (Editor opinions: 1)

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