Best Of MWC Awards: This Is The Tech To Watch!

Mobile World Congress is here and some of the biggest companies are getting together to show off their latest wares. Barcelona, Spain is the home to Europe's biggest mobile event of the year, and I was on the ground for SlashGear looking for the coolest things I could find from vendors big and small.

MWC has a lot of innovations and concepts that might not quite be ready for prime time — but our focus here will be the awards, and companies that are releasing actual products you can or will be able to buy in 2025. While concepts are fun — and that's why I've kept you up to date on all the impressive stuff I've seen from day to day — it's time to focus on the definite.

Of all the various products I came across, here's the best. You should certainly seek these out once they hit the market (if they're not there already).

I've been a fan of Lenovo/Motorola's Smart Connect since it was called "Ready For." When it comes to data sharing between your phone and your computer, Motorola was the sleeper that was already doing better than Samsung's Windows integration. Fast forward to today, and Lenovo (Motorola's parent company) is making the sharing system even better, and more intuitive than it's ever been.

Smart Connect is rolling out to all Android devices, meaning you'll soon be able to use it on your Samsung smartphone and tablet. Smart Connect will work between all three of your devices — smartphone, tablet, and Windows computer. Some functionality will be exclusive to Moto and Lenovo devices; it has to be, due to the access needed to accomplish some of these functions, but a lot of the general functionality will be there regardless of who made your hardware.

One of the cooler tricks that Motorola showed off was app streaming to your PC — this is nothing new, but the mechanism for launching it is. First of all, if you swipe up on an app on your phone and swipe to the center of the screen (similar to bringing up your cards), you can simply drop the app onto a button and that will send the app straight to your default device — PC or tablet. Plus, you can use voice commands to "launch Instagram on my PC." Finally, you can universally search files between your phone, computer, and laptop, if, for example, you can't remember where you saved that document.

None of these concepts are particularly new, but the mechanism for implementing them is super intuitive and wide reaching, which is exactly what the tech needs for large scale adoption. I'm excited to see if it catches on.

Tablets are not a terribly exciting product category. Usually, it's either a productivity tablet that can do everything your computer can do but in a slimmer package, or it's a little movie consumption box that you can pick up cheap. Neither grabs me, and says "Pay attention."

Honor is bucking that trend by launching the Honor V9 Pad, which is a 250 Euro tablet with an 11.5-inch screen that refreshes at 144 Hz. It's powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 8350 Elite processor, which is not a flagship processor, but it's also no slouch. During my review of the Honor V9 Pad, I noted I was able to have extended gaming sessions with "Genshin Impact" without it heating up or suffering from lag.

The eight speakers on the tablet are really loud, especially considering the 6.1-millimeter thickness. It's a thin and light tablet with a huge screen, and honestly very few compromises for a good price.

In the U.S., if you're looking for top-tier flagship phones, there are four brands to choose from — Samsung, Apple, OnePlus, and Motorola. Overseas, Xiaomi adds another phone to the mix. This year's Xiaomi 15 Ultra certainly earns the ultra moniker. This is a Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered phone with 16GB of RAM and 512 or 1TB of storage. It has a 6.73-inch WQHD display with 3,200 nits of peak brightness and a 5,410 mAh battery with 90W of wired charging. But let's talk about the cameras.

There's a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera, 50-megapixel main camera, 50-megapixel 3x optical zoom camera, oh and by the way, there's also a 200-megapixel 4.3x optical zoom lens which is capable of zooming up to 120x. That is a monster camera set, and Xiaomi has been very good at cameras for a long time. That's not all.

Like last year, this year Xiaomi is selling an additional Professional Photography Kit Legend Edition. This is basically a striking phone case with an additional camera grip accessory that allows you to zoom, snap photos or video, and even adjust f-stops. The camera grip also comes with an additional battery so you can power your phone for even longer. The red on black color combination is absolutely beautiful. There are also interchangeable accents you can add including a lens ring and a shutter button for even more customization. I should mention that during my testing, the accent button fell off and I had to go back and find it an hour later, but I did! Besides that, I'm absolutely in love with this kit.

Nothing isn't exhibiting at MWC, even though it hosted a launch event in Barcelona during the same time period. Therefore, this isn't technically a best product of MWC, but it still gets an honorable mention. The Nothing Phone (3a) Pro is a very good phone that can be had for under $500. The design is remarkable, as is typical for Nothing Phones, but the specs are all very good too including the Snapdragon 7s Gen3 processor 8/12GB of RAM and 128/256GB of storage — all on par with offerings in that price range.

On top of all that are the cameras, which for the first time include a 3X optical zoom periscope lens, and Nothing's already incredible software which now includes Essential Space — a sort of storage area for screenshots, memories, and reminders. It uses AI to organize everything for you and present it in a meaningful way. If Nothing has put as much thought into Essential Space as it has into every other part of its software, I'm looking forward to using it.

As for the cameras, this phone gives you a lot of camera chops for the price. The main camera and telephoto are both 50-megapixels, meaning you can get a lossless zoom shot at 1x, 2x, 3x, and 6x, which gives you a lot of choices. The camera quality is also quite good considering the price point for this phone. This is a solid recommendation for someone shopping in the midrange category.

Let's all be honest here; 2025 is going to be the year of smart glasses — and AI — but this is about smart glasses. Tecno launched a set of AI smart glasses that combine a couple of principles into one device. These glasses have a center-mounted, 50-megapixel camera over the bridge of the nose for photo capture, and they have an AR display in the lens that allows you to interact with your phone.

The AR interface is monochrome — green. It's roughly on par with something like the Even Realities G1. The right side of the glasses is touch sensitive and you swipe along the arm to navigate what you want to do. It has options like direction, calendar, and even a teleprompter mode. Just tap the arm to select the option you want.

As for the camera, there's a button on top of the arm that allows you to capture an image. What's more, when you press it, you see a little bullseye to show you where the center of your photo will be. This is a feature that is sorely missing on the Meta Ray Bans. Often when you capture there, you have to wonder what the framing will actually be.

You might be wondering about the AI part, and that comes in the form of Ella, Tecno's AI assistant. Tecno didn't say much about the assistant's capabilities, but Ella is a well-established AI assistant in Tecno's phones, so it's just bringing that functionality to the glasses.

Harman automotive is a company probably best known for car audio, but it is also developing its own technologies to go into automobiles. One of those innovations is the Ready Vision Qvue. This is a reflective HUD display that can go into just about any type of vehicle. It creates an almost 3D-looking heads-up display that is very configurable and stretches the length of the windshield.

Ready Vision Qvue features up to 5,000 nits of brightness, making it very visible even in direct sunlight (or a brightly lit convention center). It's a modular design that can be adapted to fit into most vehicles. To be clear, this is not a third-party accessory; Harman plans to work with automakers to build this into their vehicles from the start.

The low-profile design goes from pillar to pillar and only really covers up the hood of the car; it doesn't obstruct a driver's view of the road. On the contrary, Ready Qvue has a "transparent hood" function that projects what is on the ground in front of the car, which is a nice add on.

I'll admit, I'm a sucker for heads-up displays. Anything that can keep a person's eyes on the road and still feed information is a big win, and this is one of the clearest heads-up displays I've seen.

Keeping your pooch safe can be a tall order, especially if Fido likes to take off or otherwise sneak out of the yard. Satellai (a portmanteau of "satellite" and "AI" that probably sounded better in their heads than it does out loud) has a product called the Tracker which earns its name. Tracker uses a five-constellation satellite positioning system and a Qualcomm modem to communicate via LTE. If your pooch flies the coop, you can find their position using the app.

Tracker is designed to last up to seven days on a single charge, which is long-lasting considering its function, and it has solar panels built into the top of it to keep it charged as long as possible. It's IP68 water resistant and very durable.

Additionally, the Tracker can record health data and activity tracking for your hound. The only downside is the harness your dog will wear to attach the tracker is fairly large, which obviously won't work so well for smaller dogs. There's no connection point to attach Tracker to an existing collar, so if you have a smaller dog, you may want to look elsewhere. Overall, we like the functionality and health monitoring, which is why it was an easy pick.

Our final entry in this list could turn out to be one of the most important innovations in the long term. Xpanceo has a trio of proof-of-concept contact lenses that could change our lives in the not-too-distant future. The first is the Smart contact lens which basically puts an LED screen on your eye to project information to you in an AR environment. The contact is powered by a wireless transmission puck that sends power to the contact to power the screen. That puck now has a longer range, which Xpanceo is working to extend even further.

Next up is the company's IOP (intraocular pressure) sensor that does exactly that. You can wear the contact and take measurements just by snapping a selfie with your smartphone. Using just that visual data, the app can tell you if the pressure in your eye is too high.

Finally, and I'll argue possibly the most game-changing contact, is the Biosensing contact lens that is designed to measure "Body parameters" from your eyelid. This lens can detect various bio readings, but the most interesting is glucose levels, meaning this could be used by diabetics to monitor their glucose levels without the need for skin pricks or even CGMs.

The latter two are awaiting FDA approval, so it'll be a while before any of these contacts can be deployed, but the benefits they could bring cannot be overestimated. That being said, there's a reason these are concepts, and not products, but Xpanceo is confident it will be able to produce all three very soon.