Mark Bridge writes:

“Hot products. Cool companies. Meet the press.”

That was the tagline for ShowStoppers, a showcase event that took place last night before today’s opening of Mobile World Congress. As you probably heard in today’s podcast, I went along and met a few of the participants.

We're in Barcelona for the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2011. It starts today - but Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Nokia all held press events on the previous evening. We cover the big announcements and also pay a visit to the ShowStoppers showcase.

The GSMA Mobile World Congress 2011 runs from Monday 14th until Thursday 17th February 2011. It’s the mobile industry’s biggest exhibition - and it’s combined with a series of conferences, workshops and keynote speeches.

TheFonecast.com will be producing daily podcasts from the event in Barcelona. We’ll be interviewing participants, listening to the keynotes and offering our opinion every morning.

Xperia Play

James Rosewell writes:

Tonight Sony Ericsson announced an impressive four new Xperia handsets based on the Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system and the Bravia graphics engine more commonly found in TVs. I got hands-on with the much anticipated Play, and its 3 siblings Neo, Pro and Arc. Here's what I thought.

Motorola Mobility has announced two new hands-free devices in its Elite Series of accessories.

The Motorola HZ800 Bluetooth headset and the Motorola TZ700 Bluetooth in-car speakerphone are both compatible with the company’s MotoSpeak2.0 application, which offers text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology allowing users to have their text messages read aloud and to dictate responses.