BARCELONA -- Mobile World Congress 2012 -- Having toured the stands at Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) and Nokia Networks and NEC Corp. (Tokyo: 6701), we sharpened our pencil, wiped our camera lenses (make of this what you will) and headed for a 10-minute tour of the ZTE Corp. (Shenzhen: 000063; Hong Kong: 0763) stand in Barcelona. (See MWC 2012 Photos: NEC Booth Tour, MWC 2012 Photos: NSN Booth Tour, MWC 2012 Photos: AlcaLu Booth Tour and MWC 2012 Photos: Ericsson Booth Tour.)

ZTE was the fifth of six mobile network equipment vendors we visited with a photographer at this year's MWC, and we 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 average visitors 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 exact same advance brief, treatment and opportunity: Some found that easier to do than others.

So here's what we saw when we dropped in on ZTE, with the overall grade, based on perceived performance, relevance and other factors (some rather subjective), provided with the final picture caption.

Click on the picture below to start the tour.



All photos taken by Siqui Sánchez/Getty Images, but he's not in any way responsible for the picture selection or the words.

You can see how ZTE and its peers performed last year by checking out the 2011 booth tours below:

• MWC 2011 Photos: AlcaLu Booth Tour
  
• MWC 2011 Photos: Huawei Booth Tour
  
• MWC 2011 Photos: ZTE Booth Tour
  
• MWC 2011 Photos: Ericsson Booth Tour
  
• MWC 2011 Photos: Cisco Booth Tour
  
• MWC 2011 Photos: NSN Booth Tour
  
• MWC 2011 Photos: NEC Booth Tour
  
• MWC 2011 Photo Tour Report Card

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading