Google was quiet, but Android was everywhere at Mobile World Congress

Google used to have quite the presence at Mobile World Congress apparently, including a massive stand which included a slide. But those days are gone and though Google doesn’t have a stand as such, they were still everywhere at Mobile World Congress. Visitors to MWC were first greeted by this massive display which covered a walkway across the road outside of the conference hall at Fira Barcelona.

Once inside, Google actually did have a booth at MWC, but they were using it purely to meet with partners. It was a pretty cool looking booth with an Android shaped door, Android decals pasted all round the side and a collage of Nexus devices stuck to the wall at the entry.

But having a booth for private meetings wasn’t all Google had going for them, there was also a fun Android presence around the place. There were two booths at MWC, both of which had staff manning large screen touch-enabled TVs, or holding Nexus 9 tablets which let attendees create their own Androidify characters and print them out as stickers which they could use in addition to their MWC pass.

One of the booths would even let you have your Androidify character printed onto a carrier bag, while the other was serving up Frappes and fruit cocktails in paper Android cups. Staff at both of the booths were also handing out Lollipops and maps to where you could collect Android pins.

Android Pins, with various designs were seeded to Android partner booths throughout MWC for people to collect, trade and give away. Booths had a Bugdroid statue at their booths indicating the presence of pins. Google even setup a website with a list of the pins to collect, that allowed you to check them off as you collected each ping. You can check it out at g.co/androidmwc.

The good news is I brought a load of these pins back to Australia and we’ll be giving them away – once we work out a mechanism for how to do so.

What’s a good competition to run to give away some Android pins?