A health checkpoint at Mobile World Congress 2022Source: GSMA / MWC Barcelona
Many popular tech brands abandoned in-person CES 2022 at the last minute due to the Omicron surge, including Google, Meta, and Twitter. Now, with not much changed from a pandemic perspective, and MWC 2022 set to arrive in about a month, mobile brands have to decide whether or not to go virtual — or skip the event entirely.
MWC UPDATE: Due to the ongoing trends surrounding COVID, Lenovo’s activation at MWC 2022 will be fully virtual.
— Lenovo Stories & News (@LenovoNews) January 25, 2022
On Tuesday, Lenovo announced it would be “fully virtual” for the event due to “the ongoing trends surrounding COVID.” The brand behind TCL phones, Lenovo recently announced some affordable 5G TCL phones at CES. At MWC, it may show off new phones like the rumored TCL 30 Pro, but attendees won’t have the option to test its phones in person.
Sony also informed Techradar that it “will not be holding its own booth at MWC 2022,” virtual or otherwise. The brand hasn’t attended MWC since 2019, so this won’t prove much of a surprise.
Techradar did receive confirmations from Huawei, OPPO, and Xiaomi that the three brands will attend the event in person.
Huawei has six stands at the event, making it likely the brand has big plans there to showcase its P50 Pocket and other unannounced phones. OPPO’s one stand could show off the OnePlus 10 Pro — still unreleased outside of China — or the recently leaked OnePlus Nord 2T. Xiaomi will also have just one stand for its announcements.
In terms of brands that haven’t yet made their plans clear, Samsung has a whopping eight stands reserved at MWC 2022. It did stick to in-person CES, but may have at least considered cancelling, with it “closely monitoring the current health situation” beforehand. It’s unclear if anything has changed for MWC.
If Samsung does stick to in-person, it’ll likely showcase the newly released Galaxy S22 and Tab S8 set to ship in late February. But it could also show off its new Galaxy A lineup for the year, like the leaked Galaxy A53 5G. Or, we could see more of the company’s foldable prototypes.
Qualcomm (one stand), Nokia (five stands), and Honor (two stands) also appear to have in-person plans for now. And other brands like ASUS and Realme are expected to make an appearance. We’re excited to see if any of the future best Android phones will get an MWC reveal, whether it’s virtual or in-person.
After a messy half-virtual CES exposed the problems with tech events today, we have to wonder what’ll happen with MWC and whether other companies will follow Lenovo’s lead.
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Source: https://www.androidcentral.com/lenovo-sony-bow-out-person-mwc-while-other-phone-brands-stay-person