Mobile World Congress – now called MWC Barcelona – is the world’s largest event for all things mobile. Not merely for phone, tablet and laptop launches, but for mobile operators and network infrastructure too. In other words, the foundation of the modern economy.

Almost 90,000 participants are expected this year, as the world of trade shows recovers from the Covid pandemic. And, Apple aside, all the big industry names are in attendance.

Over the course of MWC Barcelona 2024, from the pre-show announcements on Sunday 25 February to its official close the following Thursday, we’ll pick out our favourite products.

Best phones of MWC Barcelona 2024

Honor went big at MWC Barcelona 2024, launching a Porsche Design-branded update to its 9.9mm-thin foldable and the Honor Magic6 Pro, which wins our Best phone of MWC award. It includes an astonishing set of cameras, including a 180-megapixel unit with a 2.5x optical zoom.

We also gave awards to two other phones. The Energizer Hard Case P28K wins for Best budget phone and the Doogee DK10 wins our Best rugged phone award.

Best laptops of MWC Barcelona 2024

We knew that Dell, Honor and Lenovo would be announcing new laptops at MWC. The question was, which would win awards? It turns out all three companies would take honours, but for different reasons.

Lenovo – together with iFixit – won our Best innovation of MWC award thanks to their superb efforts to make the ThinkPad T series laptops more repairable.

Honor walks away with Best AI PC award, for its thoughtful and genuinely useful combination of AI hardware with software. We explore this more in the first-look Honor MagicBook Pro 16 (2024) review.

Dell earned an award for the Best business laptop, namely the Dell Latitude 7450. It’s been updated with Intel’s Core Ultra chips, now with the option of vPro support.

Best peripheral of MWC Barcelona 2024

Lenovo picks up our Best peripheral of MWC award, and not for its slim USB-C travel dock (although we did borrow that at one point, so thank you Lenovo!). Instead, it was its gorgeous 4K travel monitor that caught our eye. Look out for the Lenovo ThinkVision M14t Gen 2 when it’s released in August (expected price, €399).

Best tablet of MWC Barcelona 2024

We really like the Honor Pad 9, an Android tablet that costs £300 in the UK, but our top choice is the Huawei MatePad Pro 13.2 tablet. Sure, it doesn’t run Android, but this is a brilliant productivity machine and earns our Best tablet of MWC award.

Business changer of MWC Barcelona 2024

Our final award of the show is Business changer of MWC Barcelona 2024. This goes to the product, technology or concept that we believe the show could be remembered for.

And this year we’re giving the award to Lenovo and iFixit once more for their work to make laptops more repairable.

Updated on 28th and 29th February with winners and a new lead photo.

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Tim Danton

Tim has worked in IT publishing since the days when all PCs were beige, and is editor-in-chief of the UK's PC Pro magazine. He has been writing about hardware for TechFinitive since 2023.

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