A quick walk through the yearly Mobile World Congress – the biggest mobile phone show around – and you’ll realise you are actually gazing at a crystal ball that shows what people will tote in their hands in the coming months.

Here in Barcelona, as this year’s phone extravaganza kicks off today, the power is clearly with Google’s Android. With Sony Ericsson, Motorola and China’s Huawei showing off world-beating Android phones this week, it’s easy to think 2010 will be the year of the Google phone OS. (HTC has also launched two hot numbers in the Legend and Nexus One-lookalike Desire).

But very clearly, rivals are not going away quietly. Microsoft, Samsung and Nokia all have their sights aimed at the emerging powerhouse OS.

Voice search for your phone – sounds good yeah?

I thought so too – so I tried out the latest Google Mobile App’s voice search feature on my Nokia E71 (which means the S60 flavour of the app).

Google Mobile App

The app is basically kinda like a one-stop-shop to quickly link to and search through Google stuff, so you will need a data connection (wifi or cellphone network), and the other mobile apps (Gmail, Google Maps etc) loaded if you want to fire it up from the above home screen.

If you enable its location-based function, it’s supposed to yield more relevant results. But it didn’t seem to do anything for me in terms of returning more relevant search results so I shut that feature off.

Nokia launched its 2009 flagship model, the Nokia N97 with much fanfare in Kuala Lumpur on Friday, ahead of the Palm Pre and the new Apple iPhone which are expected to be available in the next few months.

Techgoondu had the chance to lay our hands on a Nokia N97, which Nokia says will bring the power of a mobile computer to a compact package.

The N97 is well-designed in several aspects, including its large 3.5-inch touch screen, solid build quality with a slide-out screen and an extensive suite of onboard software.

Gin already wrote a post on Nokia’s “Comes with Music” launch in Singapore today, but I’ve a few additional pictures and prices for readers.

Nokia 5800 Xpress (courtesy of Nokia)

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
Estimated retail price: S$798
Availability: From 28th Feb 2009, Saturday (tomorrow)
Colors: red and blue, with silver-black from mid-March
Specs and features: Pretty standard for a mid-range touch phone. 3.2 megapixel camera. 3G, HSDPA and Wi-Fi. Comes with built-in A-GPS. Free 8GB micro-SD card. For all the specifics, go to Nokia’s product pagehere.

But I totally agree with Gin and Alf that the key differentiator is the “Comes with Music” service by Nokia. Brilliant tactical move by the handset giant. Basically, it allows users unlimited downloads of tracks from Nokia’s music store for one year. According to Nokia, they have about four million tunes in the store. Operator charges are of course separate. Singapore is the first country in Asia to run this service; it was first launched in UK last October.

My beloved and well-worn Nokia E71 now has a pair of bigger and smaller siblings. The Finnish phone maker yesterday did a glitzy catwalk launch of the E75 (left in the picture above) and E55 (right), which also saw the unveiling of other new phones, at the swanky club Zirca (the former Ministry of Sound). Nokia held the Singapore launch in conjunction with its new product unveiling at the Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona this week.

Here are my 2 cents on both models after a hurried hands-on session at the event:

Heavier and chunkier, though smaller in girth, than the E71, the E75 is comfortably one of the sveltest slider smartphones phones in the market. What I like: the 3.5-mm headphones jack, the motion-sensitive screen that pivots when you turn the phone’s orientation between landscape and portrait, and the fact that it is essentially an E71 on steroids.

What didn’t float my boat was keeping the screen size the same – 2.4-inch, 240×320 pixels – as the E71 despite the bulking up. Really, Nokia, why? Okay, you get a more spacious keyboard, but the E71 is already dandy in that department. So the payback for the extra bulk is for the numeric keypad and traditional phone styling.

The skinny E55, on the other hand, comes with the same screen size as the E71, as well as a 3.5-mm headphones jack, despite losing weight and being smaller.

Nokia N97

Right after Sony Ericsson shipped its Xperia X1, along comes Nokia’s new N-series “hero” product, the N97, that comes with, surprise, a slide-out keyboard.

But unlike the Xperia, which runs on Windows Mobile, Nokia’s N97 uses Symbian OS, the company behind which it recently acquired.

Notably, from early hands-on first-looks here at the Nokia World show in Barcelona, the N97 has a few promising features.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Nokia has taken the wraps off its new 5800 XpressMusic phone, the long-awaited touch-screen phone from the top phone maker.

Pictures of the device, Nokia’ answer to the touch-screen craze sparked off by Apple’s iPhone, had been out on the Web in the days prior to the launch.

So it was no surprise when the device was unveiled here today. If it looks a bit like the iPhone, or Samsung Omnia, you are absolutely right!

Nokia ovi

A year after announcing its ovi online services, Nokia today showed off a near-complete version of its answer to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s online offerings here in Singapore.

At a demo for reporters at the Geek Terminal cafe here, it presented new features like remote file sharing and sync’ing of contacts.

ovi is Nokia’s attempt to hook up its phone users to online services, seeing how Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are reaching out to mobile users through their Web-based e-mail, calendaring and productivity offerings. Let’s not also forget Apple and its tightly-integrated iTunes and recently, MobileMe application.

When fully ready, Nokia’s ovi offers the usual calendaring, contacts backup, as well as maps and games. Sounds like Google? Yup. Reminds you a bit of Apple’s iTunes and AppStore? Uh huh.