Walking quickly through Mobile World Congress you are overwhelmed with hard edges, straight lines and and endless line of boxy booths kitted out with faux white leather couches, sand-colored, multi-purpose wooden cubes, or giant LED video screens flashing corporate logos and geometric shapes.

From afar, the show has an impersonal air. You can almost hear the words, "business, business, business," replacing the never-ending buzz that fills Halls 1 through 8 and beyond.

But if you take a minute to stop and look, you'll notice small (and sometimes odd) human touches here and there -- a stuffed bear wearing a shirt, a fairy shooting an arrow, a tiny smiley face emoticon pillow sitting in a car amidst a display of mobile phones, a fancy ribbon wrapped around an odd dinosaur-shaped IoT camera device, a little stuffed cat wearing a blue jacket. It seems we humans can't resist adding softness to the starkness and personifying the impersonal.

While your takeaways from Mobile World Congress were probably about how close we are to 5G, my main takeaway was that when the machines do rise up, I suspect they will have the sad, lonely blinking eyes of the dog you left at home. And I'm happy to offer digital proof for anyone who missed it!.

 

— Elizabeth Miller Coyne, Managing Editor, Light Reading