Courtesy of Sony Ericsson

When Techeye was a little boy living in the village, we didn’t have any fancy telecommunications gear. We didn’t have mobile phones or landlines or newfangled walkie-talkies. Heck, the average conversation consisted of two grunts and a hiccup. And that’s the way we liked it.

We stood around all day herding muck in the same way as our grandpappy’s grandpappy – with a pointy stick. If you got bored and wanted to “give somebody a ring” in those days, you walked 20 miles to their house and back, a journey uphill in both directions, fighting off rabid marmots the whole way.

Ah, how the times have changed. Gone are the glory days of the muck herder. The kids have all abandoned the old ways, either fleeing to the city (as Techeye has admittedly done) or by creating indefatigable, super-pointy-stick-wielding cyborgs to do the work for them. Now, just like any high-falutin’ city kids, they spend most of their time wrasslin’ slicked-up pigs and playing with expensive new smartphones.

Due to this latter fixation, nothing got done in the village last week – all the kids were glued to the internet, awaiting news from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the industry’s biggest annual showcase. The biggest trend at the congress was the death-knell of the clamshell phone, as all the big phone-makers focused this year on boosting the screen sizes of bar phones.

Other new trends included solar-rechargeable phones, projector phones and software solutions such as the Windows Phone 7 Series mobile operating system and LG’s S-Class UI. Sadly, no scratch-and-sniff technology was unveiled.

HTC’s svelte Legend was among the new offerings. It boasts a 3.2-inch AMOLED display (generally a good thing), a five-megapixel camera with a flash and it’s apparently built from a seamless piece of aluminum. Also, instead of a trackball, the Legend has an optical joystick. To quote Homer Simpson, “Mmmm, optical joystick.”

It should be available in Europe this April; pricing has not been announced.

Then there was Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X10 mini, a brazen minx of a phone which packs a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and “four corner control,” an invaluable feature for people with unruly corners. Like the Legend, the Xperia X10 mini has a five-megapixel camera, but it also comes equipped with software to facilitate Twitter and Facebook updates as well as YouTube access. It’s due out in H2 in “selected markets.”

There were literally dozens of other cool new phones at the Mobile World Congress last week, and describing them would take up most of the paper. Suffice to say this – in a few years even the dumbest new phones will be smartphones. And the smartphones will probably be called uber-mensa-super-toasterphones. Unless, of course, Apple already has that trademarked with an “i” in front.