MWC 2025: all the phones, gadgets, and commentary from Barcelona

Mobile World Congress shows us the best and wackiest new ideas in mobile tech every year, with a side of jamón and “Oh, shit, was that the king of Spain who just walked by?” It’s a real trip. But this year’s conference was a mix of unusually odd oddities, including phone camera concepts I swear we tried 15 years ago to screens you can bend every which way.

The phones themselves were predictable, and, often, predictably good. It was everything else in the margins that was weird: phones with weird back panels, things you put on your phone, or just really cool phone-adjacent screens.

Mobile World Congress 2025 is well under way in Barcelona, Spain, and while there’s still one day left, the mobile-focused show has already delivered lots of new laptops, smartphones, concepts, and innovative accessories.

Some of the biggest announcements were made over the weekend, so we want to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Here are the best gadgets that have debuted at MWC 2025 so far, but there’s still more to come. You can catch up on all of our coverage of the show right here.

It was just a year ago that I had my first demo of the Humane AI pin — which was also my last, as it turned out. But another AI gadget at this year’s MWC is trying to take off where Humane crashed and burned, and in ways it’s even weirder than the AI pin. It’s a phone that captures tons of information about you, both past and present, and uses it to create your own AI avatar to act as a virtual assistant. It’s part Rabbit R1, part Gemini Assistant, part science fiction. And oh yeah; there’s some blockchain stuff too. I told you, it’s wild.

The team behind Newnal AI is based in San Francisco and Korea, and established itself by creating a blockchain-based vaccine verification method used widely in Korea. Early in my meeting with the company’s founder YT Kim, he stressed one thing to me: “We never sold cryptocurrency.” They’re clearly aware of the bad vibes around blockchain right now.

The cameras on our phones won’t stop getting bigger. Xiaomi’s new 15 Ultra is dominated by an enormous ring of cameras on the back, Nothing has rethought its camera layout from scratch to fit a periscope into the Phone 3A Pro, and consistent rumors suggest that even Apple is going to strap a big ol’ camera bar onto the back of its iPhone 17 Pro models later this year. But why stop there? What if you could get all of the heft and weight of a real camera and burden your phone with it? What if we could make your phone camera much, much bigger?

That’s what both Xiaomi and Realme have attempted to do at this year’s Mobile World Congress, with two very different concept phones that each attempt to bridge the gap between a smartphone and a DSLR.

For a phone show, there’s an awful lot of cool non-phone stuff at Mobile World Congress this year. Take Lenovo’s ThinkBook Flip concept, which answers the question: “What if your laptop unfolded, and then unfolded again?” Samsung’s Display group has been apparently thinking along the same lines, because it has some interesting new folding concepts at MWC including a briefcase screen and a foldable gaming handheld, which I want, like, yesterday.

Samsung Display is, of course, a display manufacturer, so these concepts are just that. They’re demonstrations of what its screens could maybe, possibly do in the hands of another manufacturer. But they’re still cool as hell, and they were very popular with MWC attendees who had to constantly be told to stop trying to touch them. That was especially true of this Switch-style portable gaming handheld mockup, which opens fully flat and folds in half for storage when you’re done playing.

The Nothing 3A phones were just announced with a new take on the company’s “make tech more fun again” ethos. These devices have improved hardware over the Phone 2A, updated cameras, and a new feature called the Essential Space to store and index your miscellaneous screenshots, voice memos, and photographs, all through a dedicated button. Starting at $379 for the 3A and $459 for the 3A Pro, they offer solid specs for their midrange prices — and a look at what Nothing has been working on for this AI-centric moment.

The 3A and 3A Pro are mainly differentiated by their cameras, which you’ll notice just by glancing at the two devices. The 3A Pro’s prominent round camera housing includes a 3x periscope telephoto lens; the 3A offers a standard 2x zoom. Both phones include a 50-megapixel f/1.8 main camera and an 8-megapixel ultrawide. The telephoto cameras on each use a 50-megapixel sensor for lossless crop zoom: 4x for the 3A and 6x for the 3A Pro.

Deutsche Telekom is building a new Perplexity chatbot-powered “AI Phone,” the companies announced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona today. The new device will be revealed later this year and run “Magenta AI,” which gives users access to Perplexity Assistant, Google Cloud AI, ElevenLabs, Picsart, and a suite of AI tools.

The AI phone concept was first revealed at MWC 2024 by Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile’s parent company) as an “app-less” device primarily controlled by voice that can do things like book flights and make restaurant reservations. The capabilities are like those promised by “large action model” products, including the Rabbit R1. In a press release, Deutsche Telekom board member Claudia Nemat says the forthcoming AI phone with Perplexity Assistant can book a taxi and do your shopping without having to switch apps on your phone.

Chinese phone brand Infinix is known to show off a flashy concept, and at this year’s MWC the company is looking skyward for inspiration. It’s showing a phone with an integrated solar panel on the back, as well as a solar charging phone case. They’re both in the concept phase, but the demo units I saw at MWC were functional and the idea is plenty appealing.

Infinix calls this SolarEnergy-Reserving technology, and it uses perovskite solar cells like Anker’s beach umbrella and cloak concept. These cells are thinner and cheaper to produce than traditional silicon solar cells. That’s paired with a system that helps regulate voltage called Maximum Power Point Tracking. The idea is to maximize power while managing heat; sitting under a hot sun might be good for solar cells, but it’s generally not great if you want to keep your phone from overheating. As it exists now, this technology can charge a phone at up to 2W, and is intended to pad out a phone’s reserved charge while it’s not in use.

Lenovo has another funky experiment it’s announcing at Mobile World Congress: the ThinkBook “codename Flip” AI PC Concept. It’s a productivity / business laptop with a flexible display, allowing it to be used as a traditional 13.1-inch clamshell, a folded-up 12.9-inch tablet, or a laptop with an extra-tall 18.1-inch vertical screen.

The ThinkBook Flip uses the same OLED panel as the $3,500 ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 that’s expected to arrive sometime in June — only here, it’s set up to fold behind the main portion of the screen instead of extend out from underneath it. That means there are no motors, which could bring costs down, and none of the display is left sitting unused inside the chassis — hence the Flip’s 0.4 inches of extra screen real estate over the Gen 6.

Lenovo is throwing ideas at the wall with new modular accessories for the magnetic Magic Bay connector of its ThinkBook 16P Gen 6 laptop. At Mobile World Congress 2025, the company announced four different proof-of-concept add-ons that may or may not ever be released, and they’re as cool as they are quirky:

There aren’t many details on the concepts yet, though the 2nd Display and Dual Display are the most straightforward. They’re meant for people who want a mobile multimonitor setup that doesn’t require a secondary device to plug in or keep charged. The 2nd Display is like attaching an 8-inch iPad Mini to your laptop, with a vertical orientation that could be great for social feeds and communication apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams. It has a panel with a 1920 x 1200-pixel resolution and 60Hz, which is plenty of resolution for a small screen.

Lenovo may have some cool new flippy-screened and solar-powered laptops it’s showing off at Mobile World Congress this year, but it’s also announcing the generational notebook updates you’ll actually be able to buy within the coming months. Some of the new models include a redesigned and super lightweight ThinkPad X13 notebook, the first T-Series convertible 2-in-1 with the ThinkPad T14s, and a refreshed ThinkBook 16p workstation.

First, we have the newest 13.3-inch ThinkPad X13, now Gen 6, that sits as Lenovo’s ultraportable slim business laptop. This time, Lenovo managed to reduce its weight even further from 2.25 pounds on the Gen 5 to just 2.05 pounds (although it could get heavier in some configurations). In comparison, Apple’s lightest M3 MacBook Air weighs 2.7 pounds.

Lenovo has announced a new concept laptop at Mobile World Congress that encourages you to work outside by reducing your dependence on power cables. The Yoga Solar PC is an early proof of concept device featuring a solar panel integrated into the laptop’s lid. It can harness light from any source to boost its battery, but as with most solar-powered devices, you’ll get the most power while working outside on a clear, sunny day.

The company hasn’t announced any plans to put the Yoga Solar PC into production. However, its ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, featuring an expanding and rollable OLED display, initially debuted as a concept at Mobile World Congress in 2023 but will be available sometime in June 2025 for $3,499.

Just days after revealing the 15 Ultra in China, Xiaomi has announced a UK and European launch for its latest flagship phone, together with the base Xiaomi 15. There’s no sign of the Pro model, but there is an array of tablets, earbuds, and fitness trackers appearing alongside the phones.

The 15 and 15 Ultra are available to order today, starting at £1,299 / €1,499 (around $1,600) for the Ultra and £899 / €999 (around $1,100) for the 15. Both are powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite and include big batteries, fast wired and wireless charging, and IP68 ratings.