MWC 2025 was all about the odds and ends
The phones may have been predictable, but there were still some oddities about.Mobile World Congress shows us the best and wackiest new ideas in mobile tech every year, with a side of jamA^3n and aOh, shit, was that the king of Spain who just walked by?a Itas a real trip. But this yearas 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.
Every trade show has a main character. A Most In Show. At CES, it was anything Jensen Huang was doing. At MWC, it was the Xiaomi 15 Ultra. There is nothing surprising about this phone, which is to say that itas a camera with a phone attached and the camera is a little better this year. But this time, Xiaomi addressed one of mobile photographyas persistent problem children: middling telephoto cameras.
While the sensors behind main cameras have gotten bigger and more capable over the past few years, telephoto cameras have been stuck with smaller sensors that behave well in good light but fa …