Interesting. The GSMA made a big deal about its 18th annual Mobile Awards winners from MWC, which we wrote about yesterday.
But it left one award outstanding: the Best New Mobile Handset, Device or Tablet at Mobile World Congress 2013, which has been awarded to the HTC One.
The decision to reveal the winner separately was made separately presumably to afford some extra degree of added prestige. Anyway, it's hard to argue that the HTC One was the best new phone present at this year's MWC.
Yet part of that was potentially because it wasn't actually announced at MWC at all, but rather the week before at a separate event.
So it got to mop up all the headlines and have the news cycle all to itself when it was announced, then get a second hit of publicity by dominating HTC's presence at MWC.
Of course, it doesn't do any harm having a 4.7in Full HD display, quad-core processor, 'Ultrapixel' camera and all the other high-end features the HTC One comes packing.
Really the only loser out of it all, if you're being critical about it, is MWC itself. The HTC One was announced before the show, in fact HTC didn't actually announce anything new at all during MWC.
Also, the GSMA award for best smartphone of the year went to the Samsung Galaxy S III, which itself wasn't announced at last year's MWC (despite the fact that its predecessor was in 2011).
And the big announcement that the Samsung Galaxy S IV will be launched in New York on March 14 went out on Monday, nicely stealing away the thunder from pretty much everyone else on what was the very first morning of MWC.
