What's cool at Mobile World Congress 2026
A packed week for tech
Mobile World Congress 2026 is happening this week, and while Can Buy or Not is not in Barcelona covering the “most influential connectivity event”, our inboxes have been inundated by tons of press releases about the new products and tech introduced at the event.
Instead of launching products at MWC, the biggest consumer tech brands have typically done their own events for key announcements — Samsung revealed the Galaxy S26 phones last week in San Francisco, while Apple has just announced the entry-level iPhone 17e and a new iPad Air. As a result, MWC has become the place for other competing brands to steal the limelight.
This year, there’s the added distraction of geopolitics with the Middle East crisis. But that aside, it’s looking to be one of the more exciting editions of the trade show, with the Chinese smartphone brands out in full force.
Xiaomi started the ball rolling with its AI-heavy “Human × Car × Home” smart ecosystem featuring its latest flagship Xiaomi 17 Ultra smartphone, smart home appliances, and the global debut of the Xiaomi Vision Gran Turismo hypercar. While we are huge fans of the cameras on the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, we are also looking forward to how Xiaomi harnesses large language models to transform the home with its own multi-modal Xiaomi Miloco (Xiaomi Local Copilot) model.
Honor showed off its new Magic V6 foldable, which is even thinner (8.75mm when folded) than the previous version, along with a tablet and a laptop. You can expect top-tier competitive specs on the Magic V6, like its Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, 6,600mAh battery and triple rear cameras. The new Honor MagicBook Pro 14, for example, will use the latest Intel Panther Lake processors.
But the most interesting Honor product showcased at MWC is the Honor Robot Phone, which grafts a gimbal-stabilised robot arm — with a 200MP camera attached — to a smartphone. Besides its potential in videography and photography, this robot arm apparently can perform some cool tricks like bobbing in time to music. It’s probably going to be a niche device that may not even be available outside China, but you can’t say smartphone makers aren’t trying to innovate.
Vivo also announced that its flagship X300 Ultra, which has a photography kit featuring an industry’s first 400mm telephoto extender co-engineered with Zeiss, will be available globally. We were impressed by the Vivo X300 Pro, so the expectations are high for the higher-end X300 Ultra. Also bringing its flagship smartphone outside China is Oppo, which announced that the Find X9 Ultra will be launched globally later this year. It comes with the brand’s most advanced cameras that have been co-developed with Hasselblad. More details will be shared closer to the launch.
Of course, AI is one of the major themes at MWC 2026. Lenovo, for instance, announced Lenovo Qira, a system-level AI that will “maintain continuity between tasks and devices while assisting based on user intent.” Qira will be integrated into over 20 Lenovo PC devices via firmware updates, and will subsequently be rolled out to Motorola mobile devices, too.
But frankly, we’re more intrigued about the Legion Go Fold. This concept gaming handheld comes with a foldable display that extends the screen from 7.7 inches to a whopping 11.6 inches. It still has detachable controllers, like other Lenovo Go gaming handhelds. Now, we’re not entirely sure how viable it is to carry and use such a device on the go, and it’s ultimately a concept that may not become an actual product, but we say, let Lenovo cook, and see what happens.
This week, we tested Xiaomi’s latest flagship camera phone, tried out the cool Privacy display on the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, and reviewed JBL’s clip-style open earbuds.
The Xiaomi 17 Ultra delivers a top-class camera phone experience, thanks to a new sensor with LOFIC (Lateral Overflow Integration Capacity) technology and a 200MP periscope zoom lens with mechanical optical zoom. The screen (6.9-inch OLED) and the battery (6,000mAh) are now larger, while the processor is a flagship Qualcomm chip. At S$1,799, it’s S$100 more than last year’s model, but the improvements are worth it.
The latest Samsung Galaxy S26 phones feature mostly minor upgrades over last year’s models. Except for the S26 Ultra, which gets an innovative Privacy display feature that reduces the viewing angles to ensure only you can see the contents of the screen. This feature can even black out specific portions of the screen, how cool is that? Unfortunately, the rest of the S26 phones are less exciting, though they do come with even more AI features than before.
JBL, too, has jumped onboard the clip-style open earbuds bandwagon with the JBL Soundgear Clips. These earbuds are lightweight, comfortable, and secure, though performance inevitably takes a hit in noisy environments due to the nature of these earbuds. More importantly, they are pretty affordable at S$199.