Samsung Corporation

Quite a few ecogeeks were excited when Samsung revealed its solar-powered cell phone, the Samsung Blue Earth. However, many bemoaned the fact that the green technology was only coming packaged in a pricey smart phone. Well, for budget-minded environmentalists a solar-charged cell phone may be in store for you as well!

The new crop of mobile phones was thin [at] the industry's big event, the Mobile World Congress [in Barcelona]. But despite scaled-down promotion, empty hotel rooms and a murky future, a few trends appeared to emerge.

A subtle but unmistakable move this year was the demise of the flip mobile phone, also known as the clamshell design. Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG all had models on display at the show, but none were center stage.

Netbooks are all the rage -- and Dell doesn't want any one company to have the right to use the term to describe the miniature notebook computers. On Wednesday Dell filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel Psion Teklogix's registered trademark for the term Netbook.

Dell is taking on the battle against Psion for the entire PC industry. Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Sony, Samsung, LG, Fujitsu, Acer and ASUS are among the top netbook makers and there's plenty at stake. Even as laptop and PC sales decline, netbooks are seeing growth.

The big news from the GSMA Mobile World Congress this year: New phones using the Android, LiMo and Symbian open-source operating systems are rolling out in 2009.

What's unusual is that it is not the handsets themselves that are creating the buzz so much as what is under the hood and invisible to the user, the basic software. Lines are being drawn in the battle for dominance among the three main systems.

Vodafone announced this week that it is launching the HTC Magic, a new touchscreen handset based on Google's Android operating system, in Britain, Spain, Germany and Italy this spring.

Expectations about new Android devices and features ran high for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. But with the show over Thursday, many of those expectations haven't been met.

The Android highlight has been the announcement that HTC, maker of the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, will release the Android-based HTC Magic for Vodafone. The Magic will be available in the spring, initially in the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France and Italy. The G1, released in 2008, has met with considerable success.

Huawei and Samsung

A new cell phone, the Samsung Blue Earth, set to be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in sunny Barcelona next week, will be able to be charged using solar panels. “We transform the limitations of the mobile phone,” said Wonsik Lee, the vice president of the research and design planning team at Samsung in a statement.

A new cell phone, the Samsung Blue Earth, set to be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in sunny Barcelona next week, will feature solar panels to charge its battery. “We transform the limitations of the mobile phone,” said Wonsik Lee, the vice president of the research and design planning team at Samsung in a statement.

While Google and T-Mobile delivered an Android-based phone on time, Samsung has pushed back the release of its Android-based smartphone. Korea-based Samsung said the handset will not be shown at the Mobile World Congress and will not be available in the second quarter as expected.

The Android-based phone was expected to launch in the U.S. on both Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. The device was rumored to have a full-screen display that would be an upscale version of Samsung's Omnia and Instinct phones.

Microsoft executives have long spun visions of a world where computer users can seamlessly share information between a PC, the Web, and a cell phone. But the company has made little progress in making that vision a reality -- at least until now.

NEC racked up a net loss of 130.8 billion yen (US$1.46 billion) in its third business quarter, versus a far less painful loss of 5.2 billion yen (US$57.9 million) in the year-earlier reporting period. Even worse, the Japan-based company indicated that the rising tide of red ink is far from over.