MWC 2021 Day 1: Important news you should not miss – Times of India

A scaled-back version of the world’s biggest mobile telecommunications event, Mobile World Congress (MWC), got underway on June 28 in Barcelona, Spain, under tight virus controls. Spain’s King Felipe V and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez were on hand for the opening of the four-day tech fair. MWC 2021 is one of the first big technology conferences staged in Europe since the start of the pandemic. Over 30,000 visitors from 143 countries are set to stream into the Catalan city for MWC 2021. Here are the key highlights from the Day 1.
The must-haves for MWC 2021
A mus-have for this year’s MWC is Covid gear. All attendees are armed with this year’s must-have tech: A negative COVID-19 test, an FFP2 face mask and a digital badge for contact-tracing.
Samsung unveils One UI watch interface at MWC 2021
South Korean tech giant Samsung unveiled the new One UI Watch software for its upcoming Galaxy Watch portfolio at MWC 2021. The new smartwatch interface, One UI Watch, combines the best features of Google’s Wear OS and Tizen.
During the event, Samsung demonstrated what the actual software will look like. It showed how settings on the smartphone will mirror those on the watch. It also teased new integrations with apps like Starva, Adidas Running, and Spotify, the latter of which will bring offline playback to Wear OS.
Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 888 Plus 5G Mobile Platform at MWC
Qualcomm Technologies announced the new Snapdragon 888 Plus 5G Mobile Platform, a follow up to the flagship Snapdragon 888. Snapdragon 888 Plus fuels flagship experiences with intelligent entertainment, including AI-enhanced gameplay, streaming, photography and more — backed by boosted performance, unrivaled speed and premium connectivity.
The platform is armed with the full arsenal of Snapdragon Elite Gaming features to harness the power of ultra-smooth responsiveness, colour-rich HDR graphics, and mobile-first desktop-level. Compared to its predecessor, Snapdragon 888 Plus offers an increased Qualcomm Kryo 680 CPU Prime core clock speed at up to 3.0 GHz and the 6th generation Qualcomm AI Engine with up to 32 TOPS AI performance, which is more than 20 per cent improvement. The company also expanded its 5G RAN Platforms portfolio with the addition of the Qualcomm 5G DU X100 Accelerator Card.
The Qualcomm 5G DU X100 is designed to enable operators and infrastructure vendors the ability to readily reap the benefits of high performance, low latency and power efficient 5G, while accelerating the cellular ecosystem’s transition towards virtualised radio access networks.