With this year’s Mobile World Congress about to shut it’s doors, it’s organizers, The GSM Association, have some awards to give away. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Samsung collected the most praise but there were some other award winners in there as well. So without further adieu, here are the winners of the Global Mobile Awards 2013.
Best Smartphone – The Samsung Galaxy S III
What else can be said about Samsung’s flagship device that hasn’t been discussed ad nauseum? Samsung stood up to the carriers here in the United States in order to get the Galaxy S III on their networks with no changes in name or specs, something only Apple has accomplished with the iPhone. What followed was a marketing push that rivaled anything that has come out of Cupertino and just a month ago the device passed the 40 million mark in sales.
Best Mobile Tablet – The Nexus 7
Google turned the tablet market on it’s ear with their collaboration with Asus on the Nexus 7. When it was announced at Google I/O last June the search giant proved that a device can be sold for short money and still have high-end specs. With a $199 starting price point for the 8GB, and initially sold exclusively through the Google Play Store, this little tablet set the stage for the mad rush we saw with the Nexus 4 and even got Apple to hastily put out a smaller version of the popular iPad.
Device Manufacturer Of The Year – Samsung
In addition to having the best smartphone of the year, Samsung also created a whole new category of devices with their Note line…The “phablet”. Initially thought of as a niche device, the Galaxy Note series sparked a bunch of copycat handsets from every manufacturer from HTC to LG. None has yet to stack up to the original. Hell if we told you a couple of years ago that a stylus would be popular again we’d be laughed off the web but here it is with the Note. Also as you’ll see a little further down, they are also have a different take on the camera. If only they could settle those damn patent disputes with Apple.
Best Feature Phone Or Entry Level Phone – Nokia Asha 305
Feature phones, remember those things that we all used to have? With Android manufacturers consistently lowering the price of smartphones to rival the cost of feature phones it’s almost a wonder that they still exist. In the Asha 305 Nokia produced a relatively affordable dual-SIM handset that featured a full resistive touch screen and was powered by Nokia’s Series 40 OS. Not much else to see here.
Best Mobile App For Consumers – Facebook
Love it, hate it, or love to hate it Facebook is still the top dog when it comes to social networking. Even after making a big to do about how they re-designed their Android app from scratch the Facebook app still leaves a lot to be desired compared to similar apps like The Google plus one. But numbers don’t lie, and with over one billion active users, Facebook is clearly doing something right.
Best Mobile App For Enterprise – Evernote
Evernote is a full suite of services that are designed for note taking and archiving. Available on just about every OS out there from Android to Web OS. This service brings note taking to a whole new level as a “note” can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or web page excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten “ink” note. Not only can these notes also have file attachments but they can be sorted into folders, then tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, searched and exported as part of a notebook.
Best Mobile Enabled Consumer Electronics Device – Samsung Galaxy Camera
Seeing a trend yet? The device manufacturer of the year left no market untouched in an attempt to get their products out to consumers. Samsung could have just slapped Android onto a camera and called it a day but they really made sure everything worked out of the box with this device. The one major flaw, if you want to call it one, is that it’s only available on carriers without unlimited data so you could be potentially running up some bills by using this regularly. You can check out our full review here.
Best Overall Mobile App – Waze
Waze took traditional GPS turn by turn directions a step further by making it “social”. Waze is a community-driven application and learns from users’ driving times to provide routing and real-time traffic updates. People are encouraged to report accidents, traffic jams, speed traps, police and can update roads, landmarks, house numbers, etc. On top of that the app will help users find the cheapest, closest gas station around them or along their route. Supported on Android, IOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and J2ME, Waze has been downloaded over 20 million times.