BARCELONA (EFE).— Now at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), mobile phones are together smarter than ever, with their perfect opposite: the so-called “dumb phones” (dumb phones), minimalist devices designed to reduce screen fatigue and improve digital entertainment, especially for most young people.
One of the great paradoxes of this year at MWC, the global epicenter of this week of innovation and connectivity, is the space it gave to voices calling for rationalization in the time of technology employment and the promotion of “desconexión”, a trend that is gaining strength in the sector.
Those voices highlighted “Breaking Bad” actor Aaron Paul, who has become an activist for more balanced use of cell phones and other devices. “We don’t want to be able to handle the development of these technologies, but we can create new ways of designing and making less attractive phones,” I say.
Also taking center stage was Light, one of the first companies to break away from this new generation of minimalist phones.
This proposal is radical in its simplicity: black phones, without artificial things and flowers, with a basic panel and functional applications that allow you to make calls, take notes and consult instructions. No social icons, constant notifications and designed templates to keep the user’s attention.
“It’s not about abandoning the mobile phone, it’s about offering a different perspective, an alternative. Devices like Light Phones are like a camera: more technological hardware that you use when needed, but that doesn’t capture your life,” Light CEO Kaiwei Tang said in a speech at the conference.
The aesthetic minimalism of these devices can be remembered in the past, as well as the famous Nokia of the late 90s, although Light impulses claim that their phones are not a thing of the past, because they “represent the future of technological development”.
“It may seem like a step forward, but in fact something more human is moving forward. It’s going back to our origins, yes, but it’s going forward: we’re pushing the artificial further to match our intelligence and the more human side of technology,” explains company member Eleph Kwong.
If Light Phones represent the opposite of so-called smartphones, in the middle are Balance Phones, an impulsive proposal in Barcelona that aspires to integrate the best of these two worlds.
“You have a big space between what a basic mobile phone is and what a smartphone is. We want to place them right in the middle and create a device that you don’t have to lose anything from day to day, but at the same time you don’t have to be in control of everything with all the ingredients that we keep stuffing,” explains Balance Phone co-founder and creator Carlos Fontclara.
For this reason, it is above all necessary to maintain those applications that really bring added value to the user, such as WhatsApp for instant conversations or Spotify for listening to music, without supporting the dynamics that engage during hours at the table.
The Balance Phone is therefore designed to structurally block apps that focus more than 70% of recreational use time, such as social networks, but maintain between 80% and 90% of “core” functionality on a day-to-day basis.
Fontclara explains that the original idea was to promote this type of device to even younger children. However, I quickly found out which families were most interested. “The story of our twenties is about fathers and mothers who want to buy their children their first mobile phone,” he describes.
In turn, Light’s operations manager, David Wheeler, assures that the majority of its customers are people aged 20 to 40, primarily millennials.
Los humanoides
Humanoid robots capable of developing industrial and social fields are proliferating at MWC this year, where they have aroused great curiosity among assistants. Virtually every page of the tech trade show, considered the industry’s most important, features humanoid androids, some dancing to the beat of viral video clips and others destined for the inn, all the subjects of videos and photos from the public.
The technology director of Mobile World Capital Barcelona, Eduard Martín, notes the proliferation of these robots, the “big news” of 2026, joining traditional human-shaped machines that are connected to humans to bring new functions such as robot.
A dancing humanoid robot called
On its side, its main side, A2 answers questions that arise thanks to the artificial intelligence (AI) system that contains it, and on its shoulders a camarero-clad robot demonstrates its abilities to serve the quarry police.
These androids, which intend to gradually connect to homes, share the conference space with a robotic body designed for emergency situations and a cleaning device that does not require human interaction.
On the other hand, China Mobile shows a fast food restaurant controlled by Lingxi robots: while preparing the food in the kitchen, the employee is responsible for bringing the food that the customer requested to the display.
The Spanish company PAL presents TIAGo Pro, a humanoid that will charm visitors with its ability to learn and replicate human movements.
The company notes that this capability is particularly useful in industry – the robot is present in textile companies – and in investigations; even in the social and health sector, to which it is fully adapted, because it has a sufficiently strong base that allows it to move through pastures or modified living spaces.
In search of this humanoid is ARI, another robot with a digital address, which the Barcelona City Council has implemented in the 500 hospitals in the city, where people using social and health telecare live.
If it is not a substitute for professionals, the android developed by the Saltó group allows you to detect – in other situations – accidents at home or accidents in the lives of elderly people.
The technology director of Mobile World Capital Barcelona points out that the “interesting thing” about innovations in robotics is, on the one hand, the connection of androids in the wider industry and, on the other hand, their addition to the human body, which will give rise to “hybrid personalities”.
“Before, they were called cyborgs, which were people who contained technological components such as an exoesqueleto or chips in the skin,” says Martín, who saw this new variant a few years ago.
Martín recognizes that there is a “certain dilemma” for humanoid robots because if they appear to humans, they “produce an identity crisis” in the population as they may be forced to replace the human hand.
“We often realize that robots exist without a human appearance, replacing what we do,” warns Martín of a robotic arm developed by the Instituto de Arquitectura Avanzada from the Spanish region of Cataluña in collaboration with Ceramic Cumella, which replicates the movement of a craftsman when enameling a ceramic piece.
If they complement each other
Supplementing human workers with the specific capabilities of robots is more productive than replacing them, according to Kate Darling, an investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the international references in the study of interaction with these machines.
“Humans have the ability to play with the unexpected. Even in classrooms and factories with well-structured environments, a human being needs a key in place,” Darling said at the Talent Arena, which was held concurrently with MWC.
Darling, author of “The New Breed,” noted that one of the current problems in the robotics and artificial intelligence debate is that they are constantly compared to human intelligence when it would be more useful to think of them in terms similar to animal capabilities.
“It’s a shame to try to recreate something we care about. We can create something that supports human capabilities or allows us to do things that we couldn’t do before,” said an expert who has been involved in the relationship between robots and artificial intelligence for many years.
In his view, just as throughout history humans have relied on the abilities of animals to augment rather than replace their own abilities, technology can now be overcome.
In the work context, it is noted that attempts to replace workers usually run into practical limits. Machines work particularly well in three structured and repetitive areas, while humans must adapt to the unexpected.
“By combining these abilities of the creative form, we can increase production in a much more powerful way that we simply intend to replace humans,” he pointed out.
In this sense, the tendency to anthropomorphize technology responds to a biological condition: humans are programmed to recognize sights and signs of life, and autonomous movement is a powerful trigger for this perception. “It includes something as simple as a robotic vacuum cleaner because it moves by itself, so people can name it,” said the investigator, who admitted she also called it “Bobby.”
In your opinion, this tendency will not go away, and some systems will be as treacherous as herramientas, while others will be considered companions.
As for future robotics regulations, he predicts that “we’re probably going to want to protect what we feel we’re emotionally searching for.”
The investigator revealed that much of the public debate is influenced by the idea that artificial intelligence aims to reproduce humans, an aspiration that he says is at the birth of the discipline and will also guide many researchers.
However, this comparison is limited. Machines far outperform humans in certain areas, such as mathematical calculations, guessing, and pattern detection in large volumes of data, but as errors that would be obvious to a human due to a different context, we advise.
Prohibition of social networks
The creator of the WWW defines a ban on social relations for persons under the age of 16
Addictive algorithms
The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, advised during the conference about the “addictive algorithms” of some social networks such as TikTok.
Various interfaces
For this reason, Berners-Lee told social media creators not to “design it like TikTok” or less addictive platforms like Pinterest.
No opposition
“I was in Australia and it was interesting to talk to the kids… I really don’t mind. I think some of them found that having a world where they could play with their friends and on the phone was quite rewarding,” Berners-Lee said.
Made in Spain
President Pedro Sánchez has announced that Spain will ban access to social networks by under-16s and take further measures to increase control of digital platforms.
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