MWC Wrap-Up: The End of Specs?

BARCELONA—Mobile phones now have more hardware than they can handle. This year's Mobile World Congress was full of spectacular specs, with quad-core processors, HD displays, and even a .

But the hardware makers are now providing more power than smartphone software can take advantage of. The gating factor isn't processor speed any more. In a growing number of places with 4G LTE, it isn't network speed. It's the ability and efficiency of mobile operating systems and apps to use the massive amount of power put at their disposal.

Android, Windows and Fancy Specs
When I  against the latest Nvidia processor, I came up with this conclusion: They're both fast. The bumps in the Android experience don't have to do with pure horsepower. Jittery scrolling, confusing settings and occasional instability won't be solved by notching up the processor speed.

Similarly, the battle between Intel and ARM in smartphones isn't going to play out over speed or battery life.  here at MWC which fit completely unnoticeably into an Android lineup. That's the price of admission. They're at the table. The battle there will play out over compatibility—whether Intel, with its different processor architecture, can make sure that the apps people want run on its platform.

When , the company said Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) would improve the user experience on both phones and tablets. But we still haven't seen many Android 4.0 devices in the market, even though we're seeing plenty on the floor here in Barcelona. Google and OEMs, meanwhile, just pass the buck when it comes to who's responsible for the long waits between Google publicly announcing new OSes and consumers actually seeing them in their hands. And until most people are using Android 4.0, app developers probably aren't going to properly target Android tablets, leaving that whole market nascent at best.

The situation with Windows Phone is both better and worse.  has a very smooth UI, but it isn't enabling manufacturers to use any of the latest hardware, which could hold it back. At this show Windows Phone decided to move down, not up, into a low-cost chipset developed in 2009.

That ties into another trend at the show. Remember that this is Mobile World Congress, not Mobile U.S. or Mobile Europe, and billions of potential mobile users live in the developing world. Several sessions featured calls for smartphones to be not more powerful, but less expensive. We have enough power, they say: Let's extend accessibility.

The Hardware That Matters
Hardware still matters, but it's the kind of hardware that isn't neatly contained in a spec sheet. Cameraphone quality still leaves a lot to be desired, but the problem isn't megapixels. It's lens quality, shot-to-shot-time, autofocus and tricks like HDR.  try to solve these problems with a new Image Sense co-processor.

Nokia's Pure View 808, the most talked-about phone of the show, is actually also going for experience rather than spec, because Nokia understands that a 41-megapixel camera is pretty silly. Most people don't really want to take photos of more than 8 megapixels; they're big enough to print, and small enough to store and transmit. The 808's 41-megapixel sensor oversamples to give you great 8-megapixel photos.

Samsung's  adds a Wacom digitizer to solve Android's problem with touch inputs. When I was testing tablet styli for artists a few weeks ago, I found Android tablets pretty much unusable for stylus drawing; they lagged and rejected small dots. The Galaxy Note 10.1 fixes that, but I still have to wonder: the iPad doesn't need an active digitizer to process touch inputs beautifully. Couldn't this have been done with software?

Build quality and design matters, a lot. When I think of the relentless parade of quad-core phones that came out at the show, the one that pops out at me is HTC's One X. The software's part of it, but a lot of the appeal is the glorious screen and excellent body quality, standing out in a sea of gray plastic rectangles.

Battery life matters, but battery life is so wibbly-wobbly that there's no standard spec for it. It's growing clear that it's not just about the size of your battery, it's about how well you use it. That may be one way chipsets can set themselves apart; if Huawei can indeed offer 30 percent better battery life on LTE, then its  has a selling point.

So What About Apple?
There's one huge smartphone maker not at this show, of course: Apple. While Samsung won the show's annual award for best smartphone and best manufacturer, Apple won the award for best tablet—and of course, didn't show up to accept it.

I didn't see anything at MWC that changes Apple's position in either the smartphone or tablet spaces. In terms of smartphones, Android devices are usually good enough, sometimes better and often much cheaper than the iPhone. I read this week about how in countries like Greece and Portugal, the global economic crisis is pummeling sales of iPhones as operators walk back from subsidies and consumers have fewer pennies in their pockets.

But the iPad 3, when it , will probably still set the standard in tablets, because it isn't about the specs. There's still no vision of a flourishing Android tablet app ecosystem, and it looks like there won't be at least until the end of the year. Upcoming quad-core tablets may very well match the iPad 3 blow for blow, but that doesn't matter if you can't find or download compelling apps, and app developers can't leverage a big ecosystem if tablets are stuck on three different versions of Android: 2.3, 3.2, and 4.0.

Keep It Locked...
Maybe this is a little self-serving. Maybe this is a lot self-serving. But in the post-spec era, you have to keep paying attention to reviews. Not just my reviews, of course. Everyone's reviews. Your friends' reviews. Listening to carrier salespeople rattling off buzzwords won't cut it, when the real issue is how fast a camera is, how smooth the scrolling is, and whether you can find the apps you want.

Focusing on overall experience is more in Apple's and Microsoft's wheelhouses than in Google's. Android was the triumphant story of 2010 and 2011. As we move away from hardware one-upmanship and more into software elegance, can Google keep up with that game?

For more, see our complete Mobile World Congress coverage.