Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is fast becoming one of the consumer tech world’s biggest trade events of the year, rivaling CES in Las Vegas in January and E3 in Los Angeles in June in terms of its sheer size and importance. Since its humble beginnings way back in 1987 the show – held at the immense 29,000 metre-square Fira de Barcelona exhibition centre – has now grown to become the mobile technology industry’s most important global gathering.

UK Technology LIVE was at this year’s event, hammering the shoe-leather to ensure that we covered all the latest and most exciting, thought-provoking and (potentially) industry disrupting news from the many British companies that were exhibiting at the show. Read on for our quick round-up of the companies, products, events and announcements that made MWC 2010 for us.

The show kicked off on Monday February 15th with new handsets being announced from major players such as LG, Samsung, Garmin-Asus, Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson

However, while we were as eager as the next early adopter in line to hear about the mobile phones that everybody is going to want later this year, it was the innovation on show at the UK Technology showcase stand in the Avenida running through the centre of the event that had us most excited, with the theme of this year’s stand being ‘UK Technology – the vital component’ – with a number of feature companies on show at the stand showcasing some genuinely ground-breaking new mobile technologies.

The Design Council-sponsored ‘Design Out Crime’ was a particularly interesting project on show at the UK Technology showcase stand, with Programme Manager, Robert Bult explaining to us how four teams of British designers were offered £100,000 each to develop their own innovative and marketable solutions to combat mobile phone theft and other related crimes.

Microsoft was creating the most amount of noise on the show-floor with the reveal of its new mobile phone operating system, called Windows Phone 7 series, incorporating Microsoft’s popular online gaming service Xbox LIVE as well as its Zune music service.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, thousands of small and medium enterprises were on hand to show off their latest tech, products and services – one such company being Revector, who specialise in  “interconnect and bypass fraud” for mobile operators, detecting and identifying illegal connections and then suspending them, saving operators millions of pounds in lost profit.

Back on the UK Technology showcase stand, there were a number of visiting groups of delegates from countries such as Japan and Sweden, all keen to see what new mobile technologies were being developed in the UK.

“The group really appreciated the fact that we had put together a unique presentation for them,” said UKTI’s Frederik Fehn. “That they could come here and get exclusive one-on-one demos from all the different UK companies to find out what they were doing, what’s on offer in the UK and how the UK is profiling itself in terms of mobile excellence.”

Taiwanese manufacturer HTC was getting plenty of attention at this year’s show for its ‘Desire’ handset, which was in many ways a beefed-up version of the popular Google Nexus One, featuring a 3.7-inch OLED screen, a new optical trackball and HTC’s Sense UI Android overlay, which took some of the media attention away from Microsoft’s announcement of its own app store, with games and other popular apps already in development for Windows Phone Series 7.

Perhaps the only major brand that was conspicuous by its absence at MWC 2010 was Apple. Even Google made something of a splash at this year’s event with the company’s CEO, Eric Schmidt telling a packed auditorium of journalists and industry pundits how Google now planned to prioritise mobile software development over the traditional PC.

UKTI hosted a number of thought-provoking and inspiring panel discussions and talks, including a panel event with Lord Davies, UK Minister for Trade, Investment and Small Business discussing the Government’s plans for the future of wireless broadband with a number of other leading representatives from the industry. You can see a video of that event right here.

The UKTI-sponsored Mobile Monday event at MWC 2010 asked whether or not mobiles were ‘killing off’ traditional media, causing some thought-provoking debates. And the UK/Turkey and UK/Japan partnership talks both proved to be fantastic networking events for the many attendees.

Music and mobile entertainment were both big themes at this year’s show, with none other than British pop star and founder of Duran Duran, Nick Rhodes and founder of Spotify.com Daniel Ek both appearing at the show to share their thoughts on the future of the mobile music industry. And the BBC’s head of technology Eric Huggers was also on hand to unveil the Corporation’s new news and sports apps for iPhone, while outlining the BBC’s future strategy for online and mobile.

And while it was nice to experience some of that pop star glamour, it was equally as inspiring to return to the UK Pavilion in Hall 1 at the show, to see what some of the many British companies exhibiting were doing.

There were lots on offer for mobile operators at both the Northern Ireland Mobile Excellence stand and the Scottish Development International stands at the show, in addition to some fascinating femtocell research from the likes of Cambridge Consultants and a glimpse at the future of ‘Predictive Text 2.0’ on the Kingston Technologies booth and the latest developments in VoIP/ internet telephony from Squire Technologies.

Tags: Events at MWC 2010, HTC at MWC 2010, MWC 2010, MWC 2010 roundup, MWC 2010 summary, Windows Phone series 7 at MWC