8:10 AM -- All six of our Mobile World Congress 2012 photo booth tours have now been published and the individual grades handed out.

To recap, we visited six mobile network equipment vendors with a photographer during this year's show in Barcelona and gave them all the exact same challenge: Show us your three market-leading/cutting-edge/most important products and tell us about them in just 10 minutes.

The idea of the exercise is to determine what an average visitor might be shown if they were trying to get a sense for what the major mobile vendors are focused on right now. All the companies were given the same advance brief, treatment and opportunity.

You can see the tours (in chronological order) here:

And in case you were wondering, there were only six tours this year, compared with last year's seven, because Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) declined to participate. That decision might have had something to do with last year's grades... (See MWC 2011 Photo Tour Report Card.)

So who is top of the pile this year? A year ago Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) took the honors with an A grade and it managed that grade again this year. However it was pipped to top spot by NSN, which garnered our highest ever grade, an A+.

Table 1: MWC 2012 Photo Booth Tour Grades

And the standard this year was higher than ever, with three other vendors receiving an A- grade (listed above in alphabetical order), leaving only NEC Corp. (Tokyo: 6701) with a can do (must do!) better grade.

It's clear that the vendors (mostly) are playing to their strengths, preparing in advance and effectively getting their messages across, which is the whole point of the exercise after all!

That suggests we need to shake things up somewhat for next year, while still retaining the overall goal of getting the vendors to provide a snapshot of their leading products. Time to put the thinking caps on…

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading