MWC 2014 day 1 round-up: the stories you missed

Home / News / MWC 2014 day 1 round-up: the stories you missed

Nokia and HTC tweet lame jokes about the Samsung Galaxy S5

Ah, rivalry between smartphone makers: always reliable as a provider of ill-advised social media jokes. Not ill-advised because they’re scathing or mean, you understand, but because they’re so tame, lame and unfunny. And here are two prime examples that popped up on Twitter in the wake of Samsung’s Galaxy S5 reveal: first from Nokia UK and then from the perennial wags at HTC.

We can’t help but feel a little sorry for the poor marketing bod or community manager that feels the pressure to moonlight as a cut-price Tim Vine at 8pm on a Monday, but, well: your day jobs, guys? Don’t give them up.

READ MORE: Samsung Galaxy S5 hands-on review

Garmin launches navigation app for Sony Xperia phones and SmartWatch 2

Garmin has pulled the wraps off a brand new navigation app exclusive to Sony Xperia smartphones, and an extension that works with the Sony SmartWatch 2.

Garmin Xperia Edition aims to help drivers “reduce stress and save time on the road” and its premium features include onboard maps, lane guidance, speed warnings, traffic updates and, er, social media integration. And when you hop out of the car, it’ll put walking directions right there on your SmartWatch 2.

The app and extension will be available from March and, after a free 30-day trial, will require a subscription of US$2.95 a month (that’s around £3, but UK pricing and availability has not yet been revealed).

Internet.org: Mark Zuckerberg’s drive to make the internet more affordable

Today at Mobile World Congress, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent a fair bit of time talking about Internet.org, the foundation he created to provide internet access to the two thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t already have it.

We’ve known about the initiative for a while, but Zuckerberg today outlined how it’ll work in a little more detail. Internet.org will work with local carriers in the third world in order to provide free access to selected web services including Wikipedia, weather reports and a stripped-down version of Facebook (and possibly, in the future, new Facebook acquisition WhatsApp).

The idea is that, by giving non-web users a taste of the web, Internet.org can show them the internet’s value and convince them to spend money on full access – and thus improve their lives. Zuckerberg admits the scheme won’t earn Facebook any profits for a while – but in the long-term it could mean millions more users for the social network.

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Tech journalism's answer to The Littlest Hobo, I've written for a host of titles and lived in three different countries in my 15 years-plus as a freelancer. But I've always come back home to Stuff eventually, where I specialise in writing about cameras, streaming services and being tragically addicted to Destiny.