MWC 2026: all the phones, gadgets, and announcements from Barcelona

Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. This time, we tried, and failed, to find it at the world’s biggest mobile trade show.

This week Barcelona was taken over by the tech industry as Mobile World Congress descended on the Spanish city. The world’s biggest mobile show, MWC featured product launches from Xiaomi and Honor, colossal booths from Samsung and Motorola, and appearances from major carriers including T-Mobile and AT&T. You know who was missing? Trump Mobile.

Unihertz’s booth at MWC was a little out of the way, but those who did find it all seemed to want to pick up the Titan Elite 2. Sure, the cosmic orange color attracted attention, and the QWERTY keyboard reminded one showgoer of his old BlackBerry. But once I picked it up, I could see why it was so popular. It’s slim, light, and pocketable, and the physical keys just beg to be pressed. I felt unencumbered, which I can’t say about the phone I’m currently using. I didn’t want to put it down, and based on the steady stream of visitors I saw at the booth, I wasn’t alone.

As usual, MWC offered a bunch of odd and delightful ideas about phones that aren’t just slabs of glass and aluminum. This year, I saw a phone with an electric igniter (it wasn’t working either time I tried to see it in action), a phone with a DJI Osmo-looking gimbal cam attached, even phones for pets. Will any of these ideas prove to be winners in the long run? Probably not, but it’s nice to imagine something different.

After over four months of teasing, I’ve finally been able to see Honor’s Robot Phone in action. And after all that, it looks pretty legit — just so long as you weren’t actually expecting a robot.

The Robot Phone could more accurately be called the Gimbal Phone, though I suspect the company’s marketing department would disagree. Its big hardware innovation is a 200-megapixel camera mounted on a gimbal arm, which unfolds from the back of the phone when you need it, and retracts behind a cover when you don’t.

We’ve been talking to phone companies both big and small this week at MWC, and they’ve basically all agreed on one point: the RAM crisis is hitting hard, and phone prices will almost certainly increase where they haven’t already.

For a major global brand like Xiaomi, volume is one lever the company can pull. To balance out the increased costs, Angus Ng, Xiaomi’s director of communications and public relations, tells us, “We can potentially go for bigger volumes, especially in the mid-range segment and entry-level segment, so then we can try to lower costs in that area.“ Pulling other levers, like scaling back flagship specs, isn’t considered an option. Says Ng, “…we have to chase the latest and intend to showcase our best.” The Xiaomi 17 and 17 Ultra launching this week in Europe match last year’s pricing, but it sounds like that trend might not hold in the long term.

Mobile World Congress 2026 is still in full swing in Barcelona, Spain, with announcements continuing to come from the mobile-focused show that runs until March 5th.

To make sure you don’t miss the best new smartphones, laptops, concepts, and accessories, we’re rounding up all the most newsworthy gadgets that have debuted so far at MWC 2026. And if you want to stay on top of all the news, you can follow our full coverage of the show right here.

Year after year, we mostly know what to expect from our smartphone upgrades. Galaxy, iPhone, Pixel, or whatever else, everything seems to get slightly better (and occasionally more expensive) without many surprises in store. That’s not to say there are no new ideas left in smartphones, though. You just have to know where to look.

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Allison Johnson reports back from Mobile World Congress, which is positively overflowing with ideas about smartphones. There are the big-name companies like Samsung, showing off the Privacy Display tech that you might soon start to see in other devices. There are the Motorolas and Honors of the world, relentlessly shipping new stuff. And there are companies like Tecno, which just keep building prototypes in the hopes that one might catch on. Allison helps us sort the silly and the serious, as we look ahead to the year in phones.

When it launched the 17 and 17 Ultra in Europe on Saturday, Xiaomi bucked an industry trend: it didn’t really talk about AI all that much. And it really didn’t talk about AI when it showed off the two phones’ cameras, including a special edition 17 Ultra co-created with Leica. According to Angus Ng, the company’s director of communications and public relations, that’s no mistake.

“We’re still currently focusing on what is the limitation of hardware,” Ng told me at MWC 2026, when I asked why its photography approach seemed so different to Google and Samsung’s recent Pixel 10A and Galaxy S26 launches. “If it really comes to a point where we cannot do any more innovations, then we’ll also start looking at the software side.”

Vivo rarely has a presence at MWC, but this year it bucked that trend in a big way, with the reveal of its next flagship phone, the X300 Ultra, alongside an upgraded telephoto extender lens and professional camera cage. The company isn’t ready to launch the handset just yet — or even reveal very many of its specs — but gave us an early look at what it’s cooking up; that smartphone-sized 400mm lens is wild to behold in person. Vivo also confirmed that whenever it does arrive, it will be the first Ultra to go on sale outside China.

The only concrete detail about the X300 Ultra itself Vivo would confirm is that it will have a 200-megapixel telephoto camera. That was true of last year’s X200 Ultra too though, so we’re still waiting to find out what upgrades Vivo has in store from my favorite phone camera of last year.

After teasing a magnetic, modular smartphone concept the other day, Tecno has followed that up with another two phone designs centered around color-changing finishes: one with E Ink, and the other incorporating neon.

I’m the most taken with the Pova Neon, which the company says includes genuine neon lighting, not just bright colors: it uses “ionized inert gas lighting technology” to create a glowing effect.

Like it or not, more AI wearables may be on the horizon – or at least Qualcomm seems to think so. Today the company announced its new Snapdragon Wear Elite chip.

At a press briefing, Qualcomm said it considers the Elite to be a “wrist plus” chip. Meaning, it won’t replace the previous W5 Plus, but exist alongside it. The company said it expects the Elite will appeal to gadget makers looking to create AI wearables such as pendants, pins, and potentially display-free smart glasses. (More powerful smart glasses will likely use its AR chip.)

Lenovo put a foldable display on a gaming handheld. The Legion Go Fold Concept is a Windows-based handheld with a flexible POLED display, detachable Joy-Con-like controllers, and a folio case to turn the whole thing into a mini laptop.

You can use it as a standard Steam Deck-esque handheld with the display folded down to 7.7 inches and controllers attached at its sides, or you can unfold it for a bigger experience. When unfolded, the controllers can be repositioned to all four sides, allowing you to play with the screen in vertical or horizontal orientations.

One of Lenovo’s big laptop concepts for MWC 2026 is a modular ThinkBook with two screens. Officially called the ThinkBook Modular AI PC Concept, the proof-of-concept is a 14-inch productivity machine with two plug-and-play interchangeable ports and a second 14-inch display magnetically attached to the rear of its lid. The second display is removable and can be propped up on a magnetic kickstand (stored under the laptop) and plugged in via USB-C.

But this concept PC has one more trick: removing the keyboard / trackpad deck and replacing it with the second screen, turning the whole thing into a dual-screen laptop you use with the keyboard and trackpad connected via Bluetooth — like the Asus Zenbook Duo.

Lenovo is announcing five new ThinkPads and a new ThinkBook laptop for MWC 2026. There are various new chip offerings and updates for this swathe of ThinkPads, but the device I find the most interesting is the X13 Detachable. We haven’t seen a major update to Lenovo’s tablet-style ThinkPad in years, when it was the X12 Detachable.

The new releases (and starting prices) are:

Lenovo has a few new Yoga laptops it’s announcing at MWC 2026: the 14-inch Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, 15-inch Yoga Pro 7a, and 14-inch Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition.

The most interesting of the pack is that 9i 2-in-1, outfitted with a 2880 x 1800, 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It includes a Yoga Pen Gen 2 stylus with a case that attaches to the laptop’s lid. Fold the convertible back with the pen case attached and the screen sits at a slightly elevated angle. This should be more ergonomic while drawing and taking notes than writing on it flat, and the laptop has rounded edges and corners for a comfier grip. The 9i’s main specs include an Intel Core Ultra 7 355 Panther Lake processor, 32GB of RAM (soldered), and up to 2TB of storage. It’ll start at $1,949 when it launches in May.