Mobile World Congress is back, and while it’s not exactly bigger than ever, the returned trade show is still one of the most important moments in the mobile industry calendar.
This year still saw plenty of major launches, with the likes of Realme, Honor, and Poco all taking the opportunity to launch new phones, while elsewhere we saw new laptops, wearables, and more.
The Tech Advisor team spent the last few days roaming the show floor and scoping out press conferences to find all the new MWC products that really matter: the new tech that we think will be must-haves or earn coveted spots on our rankings of the best phones , best tablets , and best laptops .
So without further ado, here’s the best of MWC 2022.
Honor Magic 4
Honor was the only smartphone player to bring a brand-new flagship to this year’s show, but the Magic 4 and Magic 4 Pro would probably have caught our eye even in a crowded field.
With huge 6.81in LTPO AMOLED displays and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipsets these are both powerhouses, and the Pro model takes things to another level with 100W wireless charging – the fastest in any phone on the market .
These are Honor’s first flagships to get a European launch since the company split from Huawei and got Google back on its phones – but let’s hope there’s more to come.
Realme GT 2 Pro
The Honor Magic 4 series may have been the only new flagships, but but not the only high-end phones. Realme also brought along its GT 2 and GT 2 Pro to give the pair their global launch following a China reveal in January.
The Pro is the exciting model here, with the same 8 Gen 1 chip as its Honor rival, along with its own LTPO AMOLED display and 50Mp dual rear camera setup that should make it closely competitive – all while coming in at a lower price.
Realme’s grand reveal of 150W fast charging in its next flagship may have been over-shadowed by Oppo’s announcement of 240W speeds mere hours later, but the GT 2 Pro doesn’t look likely to give up the limelight.
Huawei MateBook X Pro 2022
We loved last year’s MateBook X Pro , and the year before’s , and the year before that’s , so it should count for something when we say that the 2022 iteration might be the best yet.
This premium Windows 11 ultrabook packs a 3K 90Hz display, powerful specs, and fast 90W charging. Huawei’s even moved the webcam back above the screen where it belongs.
It’s limited to 11th-gen Intel chips, and we wish there was still a USB-A port somewhere, but beyond that this could be the perfect laptop.
Poco X4 Pro
At just €299 the Poco X4 Pro is nothing if not affordable, but Xiaomi has crammed more power into this phone than you’d ever expect at that price.
You get a large, 120Hz AMOLED display; a 108Mp main camera; 67W wired charging; and a pretty powerful Snapdragon 695 chipset too.
This is no flagship – but when you can get this much for this little, maybe you don’t need a flagship anyway.
Huawei MatePad Paper
At first glance the MatePad Paper looks like little more than a Kindle rival, but there’s a little more to it than that.
For one, support for Huawei’s M Pencil stylus means that this is perfect for making notes as well as reading them, whether that’s writing from scratch or annotating books and PDF files.
But it’s also a simple HarmonyOS tablet – giving you an app store, the ability to connect headphones and listen to music or audio books, and a whole host of other tricks that no Kindle can keep up with.
Astro Slide 5G
Hopes for a new 2022 BlackBerry were dashed last month when manufacturer OnwardMobility lost the license, but BlackBerry isn’t the only keyboard phone in town.
The Astro Slide 5G is a crowdfunded Android phone from British company Planet Computers, and while it’s not technically new to MWC, this is one of the first times that people have been able to get their hands on it.
With a full sliding mechanical keyboard, decent specs, and the option to dual boot Android 11 and Linux (on the way soon), this is a lot more than just another BlackBerry rip-off.
Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro & Pro 360
Samsung has only just launched the Galaxy S22 series , so it was no real surprise that it didn’t have any new phones ready for MWC.
Instead the company brought along the Galaxy Book 2 Pro and Pro 360 : a pair of sleek ultrabooks that pack top specs. Both come in 13in and 15in sizes, with S Pen stylus support found on the convertible Pro 360, and 5G on the 15in model of the regular.
Lenovo Tab M10 Plus
Budget Android tablets aren’t often exciting, but Lenovo’s Tab M10 Plus is a welcome surprise.
For just $189 you get a 2K, 10in display; a large 7700mAh battery; and Android 12 out of the box. Spend a little more and you can add in 4G connectivity or the company’s Precision Pen stylus.
TCL 30 Series
TCL first teased the 30 series at CES in January, but at MWC it revealed a further five new handsets – bringing the line up to nine phones in total.
Yes, there are far too many of them, especially since they’re all in a similar affordable price bracket. But the thing is, they all offer plenty of bang for your buck, with attractive AMOLED displays, high resolution cameras, and surprisingly slick designs.
Lenovo ThinkPad X13s
The ThinkPad X13s features the debut of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 , the new flagship 5G laptop chip first revealed last December.
That’s not the only selling point though. We’re big fans of the 5Mp webcam, which on paper is one of the best in any laptop, especially since it supports Windows Hello face unlock too.
Author: Dominic Preston, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Previously Tech Advisor’s Deputy Editor, Dom covers everything that runs on electricity, from phones and laptops to wearables, audio, gaming, smart home, and streaming.
Recent stories by Dominic Preston:
- Instax Square SQ40 review
- Kodak Step Instant Camera review
- Kodak Step Instant Printer review
At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Portable design
- Affordable
- Easy to use
Cons
- A few bugs in the app
- Charges via Micro-USB
Our Verdict
The Kodak Step Printer is a reliable, affordable instant photo printer. It doesn’t do anything its rivals don’t, but it costs less and has few flaws to undermine its appeal.
Best Prices Today: Kodak Step Instant Printer
The Kodak Step Instant Printer – not to be confused with the similarly named Kodak Step Instant Camera – is a cheap and cheerful Zink printer that can connect to your phone to print your favourite shots on compact sticky-backed Zink prints.
There are plenty of other similar Zink printers out there, and the Kodak Step doesn’t do anything revolutionary that the rest don’t. But it’s cheap, compact, and gives you plenty of easy editing options – making this one of the better options in a crowded field.
Design and build
- Simple plastic design
- Range of cheery colours
- Compact
Kodak has kept things simple with the Step printer.
This is a compact plastic brick, small enough to slip into a pocket or handbag. Available in white, black, blue, or pink, there are few flourishes to the design outside of your choice of colour.
The only thing that really stands out is a small black-and-yellow stripe on either end. This is just a sticker though – which on the upside means you can peel it off if you’re not a fan, but unfortunately means it’s also likely to peel itself off with sufficient wear and tear.
There are two LEDs for power and charging, one button to turn the printer off and on, and that’s honestly about it. When you want to load paper to print, you simply slide the back of the body off and load in the prints – it’s simple, quick, and pretty difficult to get wrong.
App and features
- Easy to pair with free smartphone app
- Edit photos and create collages
- A little buggy
Almost everything you do with the Kodak Step is controlled through the free app, available on iOS or Android. You can set up an account with Kodak, but this is optional – everything works fine without one.
The first step is pairing the printer to the app, but this is easy enough. They connect over Bluetooth, and in less than a minute I had the app connected to the printer and ready to go.
Images can be selected from your device’s gallery, or you can connect the app to your Facebook, Instagram, or Google photo libraries for more options.
Once you pick an image, there’s a wealth of options. You can just print it as it, either in landscape or portrait format, with the option to either print the full image with a border or crop it in if it’s not in the exact aspect ratio of the Zink prints (most of your photos won’t be).
But you can also edit images. This can be as simple as applying an Instagram-style filter, or you can get more complex and tweak brightness, hue, or colour temperature, or add on colourful frames, stickers, text, or drawings. You can also create collages with multiple photos in one print – but bear in mind that due to the size of the paper, each image may end up pretty tiny.
I’ve mostly been impressed with the Kodak Step Prints app, which is well laid out – and far simpler to use than its strangely laborious step-by-step tutorial process would suggest.
That said, it’s not perfect. For one there are some odd choices, like the fact that the most detailed set of image hue sliders appear only on the ‘Print preview’ page of the app – and not, as you’d expect, in the ‘Edit photo’ section.
There are bugs to sort out too. The app has a tendency to freeze at times, especially when loading a photo to edit. The ‘Print preview’ brightness slider also seems to be entirely broken, raising brightness drastically if you so much as tap on the bar, with no option to lower it below the image’s starting point.
Print quality
- Small 2×3” Zink prints
- Sticky-backed
- Decent detail and colour
The Kodak Step prints onto ink-free Zink prints – a popular format for instant printers and cameras in recent years.
The key benefits to Zink are that the prints themselves are cheap and quick to process, the printer doesn’t need ink cartridges, and that each print is actually sticky-backed – so you can peel off the back layer and turn any photo print into a sticker.
There are two real downsides. One is size – at 2×3”, Zink prints are tiny. That’s part of why the printer itself is so portable of course, so it’s not all bad. But still, these are dinky, and too small to really display anywhere – they’re better suited to making collages or tucking into a wallet.
The bigger concern is quality. This isn’t bad by Zink standards, preserving a fair amount of detail from images and printing at a respectable colour range. Still, a little is lost from every photo, and there’s none of the charm or style you’ll find on an instant film printer like the Instax Mini Link .
Battery life
- Battery for up to 25 prints
- Charges via Micro-USB
On a full charge, the Kodak Step can apparently print up to 25 prints – I didn’t have that many to test with so can’t confirm, but it did happily make it through a full pack of Zink paper, with lots of standby time, without complaint.
The one small disappointment is that when it comes to charging, you have to use a Micro-USB cable. This is getting to be a pretty old charging standard now, and it’s plausible that you won’t really own or use any other Micro-USB products at this point.
Kodak does include a cable for you to plug into any existing USB charger, but still – it’s a bit annoying that this couldn’t use the more recent and universal USB-C standard.
Price and availability
Zink paper is relatively affordable too, though still costs around 50p/50c per sheet – less than Instax prints, but enough that you won’t want to burn through prints with abandon.
Make sure to check out our guide to the best instant printers to see how the competition stack up, or the best instant cameras if you want to take photos rather than just print them (many do both).
Verdict
The Kodak Step Printer is hardly a reinvention of the instant printer, but it’s a good example of the form.
It’s small, compact, and feels durable, with decent battery life and an easy print process. The associated app is simple too, with quick pairing and a range of options to alter your images – though I did encounter a couple of bugs and issues along the way.
Best of all, at the time of writing this runs a little cheaper than most of its rivals while doing fundamentally the same thing – enough to make it an easy option to recommend.
Best Prices Today: Kodak Step Instant Printer
Author: Dominic Preston, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Previously Tech Advisor’s Deputy Editor, Dom covers everything that runs on electricity, from phones and laptops to wearables, audio, gaming, smart home, and streaming.
Recent stories by Dominic Preston:
- Instax Square SQ40 review
- Kodak Step Instant Camera review
- Instax Square SQ1 review
