From Barcelona!

The latest annual mela of the Mobile World Congress took its mantra as ‘mobile is everything’ and displayed various gadgets including selfie Passwords, quick charging, solar smart phones among others. This year marks a quarter century, since mobile phones became mass consumer tools with the birth of digital cellular or 2G networks. Today, we can hardly imagine life without a handset. Which is why the largest annual mela of this industry— the Mobile World Congress — in Barcelona, Spain, last week, took as its mantra: “Mobile is Everything”.

Well, ‘Everything’ can be a bit overwhelming — so we will rather look for something in this techsplosion of gadgets and gimmicks that we can expect to experience in India — soon. These are the top five technologies that will likely touch us in 2016.

Selfie passwords There’s more to selfies than social media vanities. They can be an effective tool for identification — doing away with passwords, or finger print scans, to protect your phone. It can even be an alternative to verifying a credit card holder’s online identity. And since the selfie is captured live, there’s less chance for fraud. French mobile security firm Morpho, unveiled its selfie-based facial recognition technology, which uses the built-in camera of a phone or tablet, to enable secure account access. And since Samsung has come on board as one of the earliest to deploy Morpho technology, we can expect to be offered the option quite soon on their devices.

10 hours of charge in five mins Oppo, a Chinese handset brand that entered India last year, has answered the prayers of millions of users, who wait for hours for a full battery top-up. Oppo unveiled their SuperVOOC Flash Charge technology, which enables a full 10 hours of talk time with only five minutes of charging, and fills a 2500 mAh battery in 15 minutes. This uses a custom battery and a low temperature charging technique. The technology is particularly useful for charging, while downloading a video or playing a graphics-heavy game.

Solar smart phones Solar chargers can be found on some makes of phone power banks, supplementing the mains charge option. The challenge is to make a solar photo-voltaic panel thin enough to fit under the phone’s screen and transparent enough to not affect the phone’s HD and touch operations. The France-based Sunpartner Technologies has cracked the problem and last week unveiled a 5-inch Kyocera solar smart phone which needs just 3-minutes of exposure to light to provide one minute of talk time — a great alternative for a quick call, when your phone battery dies on you! Sunpartner also unveiled smartwatches from Vector Watch where a tiny solar panel effectively doubled the battery life from 30 to 60 days. All it needs is ambient light, either sunlight or indoor lighting.

AR tech and 3D without glasses In Augmented Reality, computer graphics and projections are overlaid on top of objects in the real world, adding to the richness of the information our eyes take in. The Google Glass and Microsoft’s HoloLens are the two best examples of AR and both are nowhere near wide availability.

From Japan, Epson has quietly crept ahead with its Moverio smart glasses and last week unveiled the latest model — BT-300 — laying claim to being the world’s lightest binocular smart glasses. The glasses cost the equivalent of Rs 50,000 today but this will fall with demand.

Also, at Barcelona, visitors were treated to the world’s first live SuperD livecast: stunning technology whereby they could see a full 3-D moving images, without the hassle of glasses. The system is small enough to fit into a small box, only slightly larger than a spectacle case. The content is projected on to a panel that reflects it to the viewer’s eye, while it seems to emanate from virtual space behind the panel. This might well be the point that pulls 3-D back from the doldrums.

An evolved Android Between the two, the Android-iOS duopoly has pretty much sewn up the Operating System on phones and tablets. Now, a US Silicon Valley startup — with early support from an Indian phone maker — dares to take on these giants, with a Godfather-like offer, we can’t refuse: making smartphones smarter, with super-charged, voice controlled apps. It’s called Cynogen and is actually ‘Android — evolved’. It ropes in Cortana, Microsoft’s speaking assistant so that if you want to take a selfie you just say, “Take my selfie”, and the phone obeys your command. Another cool idea is to closely integrate Skype with the phone’s dialer: No need to open the app, say your password etc. You can switch from a cell call to a WiFi call to Skype at the flick of a finger.

The Indian mobile phone maker Intex, has been the first to boldly embrace Cynogen and announce it on upcoming phones in the Aqua ACE series.