Mark Bridge writes:

Next week is Mobile World Congress in Barcelona – I’m sure don’t need me to tell you that! – and Nokia has given us plenty to talk about when we get there.

The company has dived from its burning platform into a partnership with Microsoft. Symbian and MeeGo are still around but the company’s smartphone focus will now be the Windows Phone platform. Cue much speculation about whether or not this was a good idea.

Most of this week’s other news has been about products, services and technologies that’ll be making their first appearance in Barcelona next week. Our podcast guest, Dr Windsor Holden of Juniper Research, gave us a good insight into what we should expect.

Products revealed this week included two Facebook phones from INQ, a trio of webOS devices from HP, Sony Ericsson talked about the Xperia Play PlayStation phone, ViewSonic had a dual-SIM smartphone and a dual-boot tablet… and Motorola had a flip phone. Oh, and hands-free accessories with their own voices.

When it comes to other technology, there was a lot of news about network capacity. Ericsson had a new cost-cutting antenna for mobile networks, while lightRadio from Alcatel-Lucent promised to make base stations and antennas “virtually invisible”. Nokia Siemens Networks was moving mobile traffic to WiFi without a break in service – and Qualcomm did away with networks altogether, thanks to its FlashLinq peer-to-peer technology.

Here in the UK, the Everything Everywhere partnership said it would open its own-brand shops selling Orange and T-Mobile services… while the parent companies of Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom were investigating the possibilities of working together elsewhere in the world.

And, perhaps inevitably, there was also plenty of application news – from the Wholesale Applications Community’s new members to the Yahoo! digital newsstand, and from mobile tickets to cross-platform Android apps.

Next week James and I will be doing our best to get hands-on with all the equipment that’s making the headlines. We’ll also be talking to many of the people behind that technology… and we’ll be offering our own opinion about the event.

Expect our first podcast on Monday morning. You’ll find it on the front page of our website, on our RSS feed and on iTunes as well.

Right, time to pack my universal mobile charger and head for the airport!

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