Facebook, Twitter promise more integration with smartphones at Mobile World Congress

The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has moved on to its second day, with manufacturers and tech giants including Facebook and Twitter taking to the stage to promise new updates and innovation in the mobile sector.

The keynotes come alongside new products announced by manufacturer HTC, which has delivered several of new Android-based smartphones and yet another tablet device to compete against the major players.

Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo also made sure to talk down any speculation of a Twitter-branded smartphone during his keynote.

With Samsung, LG and Nokia having already made their major announcements, HTC launched three new gadgets –the Desire, the Incredible and the Wildfire.

The Incredible S was the main focus of the day. The gadget features a 1Ghz Qualcomm chip, with 768MB of RAM and a display capable of showing video in 720p. The eight megapixel camera also features an LED flash.

The Desire S is an update to the current Desire, with a new aluminium body. The phone is similar to the Incredible S, but will ship with Android 2.4 (Gingerbread). 

Shortly after the Desire’s launch, HTC plans to release the Widlfire, which is more of a budget offering. It will come loaded with the Gingerbread software but its hardware is expected to be inferior to the other two models.

But in another announcement, HTC confirmed another trend from this year’s MWC – social networking integration. The company plans to release two new gadgets that feature dedicated Facebook buttons, the ChaCha and the Salsa handsets.

“With a single press of the button, you can update your status, upload a photo, share a website, post what song you are listening to, ‘check in’ to a location and more,” HTC said.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg used his time on stage to push that trend, saying there may not be a dedicate Facebook phone, but that more phones are beginning to start integrating Facebook deeply into their infrastructure.

“A lot has been made about a single Facebook phone,” he said. “But this year, you can expect do see dozens of phones with much deeper social integration than we have so far”.

INQ also announced phones that will integrate Facebook into the OS, and American telco AT&T said it plans to have a Facebook phone out towards the end of the year.

“HTC has brought Facebook to these two new devices in an innovative way enabling people to connect and share easily whenever they want, wherever they are,” Facebook head of mobile Henri Moissinac said in a statement.

But social network Twitter isn’t prepared to jump on that bandwagon. Chief executive Dick Costolo said there would be no talk of a Twitter-branded smartphone any time soon. However, he did say that Twitter will be seeking more integration with mobile software, given that 40% of tweets are now sent from mobile devices.

“It has to just work the same way everywhere it is used,” Costolo said. “We want to be able to tweet from any app, without having to fire up another application.”

And while Costolo said that Twitter is now going “at a ridiculous rate”, investors wanted to see more talk of revenue and profit. Ovum wrote in a research note the company needs to be talking more about how it plans to make money.

“Twitter quoted figures on healthy growth and use, which is good but not surprising. What it didn’t provide was concrete details on was how effective its nascent businesses are proving to be in driving revenues – lots of case studies of cool brands using Twitter but no hard line on the margins this brings to Twitter,” principal analyst Eden Zolle said in a statement.
 
Meanwhile, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt promised more regular updates to Android during his keynote, and also said the company had tried hard to convince Nokia to choose its own operating system instead of going with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.

“We would’ve loved if they would have chosen Android; they chose the other guys,” Schmidt said. “I think we were pretty straightforward. We would like them to adopt Android at some point in the future; that offer remains open.”

Schmidt also alluded to a type of location-marketing, saying that new business models that rely on alerting customers to local buying opportunities should “revolutionise business”.

“Look at Groupon – these models around consumerism really do work when they’re tied to location.”

The MWC will continue until Thursday.