9to5Google Best of MWC 2026: The most important new products and announcements

Ben Schoon | Mar 5 2026 - 8:30 am PT

MWC 2026 is coming to a close, so to wrap up our time in Barcelona, here are 9to5Google’s Best of MWC 2026 Awards.

So, first things first, let’s address the elephant in the room. We haven’t done awards in quite a while here at 9to5Google, but we’re excited to bring them back in 2026 starting with MWC. What’s different this time around? 9to5Google Awards are not exactly an easy achievement, as we’ll only be giving out a small handful of these at each big trade show.

For MWC 2026, we’ve selected three new launches.

Most Impactful Launch: Snapdragon Wear Elite

Compared to phones, smartwatch chips have decidedly not been on the bleeding edge. That’s starting to change with the Snapdragon Wear Elite bringing a flagship to Qualcomm’s lineup

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Snapdragon Wear Elite is a higher tier than every prior chipset, including the W5 Gen 2 announced less than a year ago, with the new chip delivering significant performance improvements and new capabilities. The 3nm chip is the first for smartwatches and wearables with a big.LITTLE architecture, and promises a 5x increase in single-core performance as a result, while also delivering a 7x improvement to the on-board GPU. On-device AI was of course a big focus as well.

So why does this chip sound so impactful? It all comes down to what everyone else had to say about it.

Google said that it is “reimagining the smartwatch experience” as Snapdragon Wear Elite “opens new possibilities, delivering the performance, battery life and connectivity essential for the next generation of Wear OS.” Samsung, meanwhile, dropped the bombshell announcement that it plans to ditch the in-house Exynos chips that it has been using for every single Galaxy Watch to date and instead adopt Snapdragon Wear Elite in its next Galaxy Watch release. That’s a big deal.

We’ll have to wait and see what adoption of Snapdragon Wear Elite actually looks like over the coming months and years, but the potential here seems absolutely massive.

Best Concept: Lenovo Legion Go Fold

CES, MWC, and IFA are the place to show off what’s next, whether the product is fully ready or not. When it comes to concepts, there’s no one better than Lenovo, and the company’s new Legion Go Fold concept really struck a chord for us here at 9to5Google.

The Legion Go Fold is a foldable display designed around the idea of a gaming handheld. Running Windows 11, the Legion Go Fold has detachable controllers that can attach to a folded 7.7-inch display, or be mounted to the other sides for a much larger 11.6-inch canvas. Lenovo also says it wants to provide a keyboard and trackpad setup that would allow the device to be used as a laptop when it’s not being used for gaming.

It’s an absolutely brilliant idea and one that, even in this early stage, showed how good it can be. There’s plenty of room for improvement and refinement before Lenovo can bring this one to market, but this concept shows how foldable technology can be used far beyond the smartphones we’re used to today.

Best New Product: Honor Magic V6

As mentioned, trade shows are often absolutely full of concepts, but with 9to5Google awards, we also specifically want to give a spotlight to a product that’s actually about to go on sale. For MWC 2026, the new Honor Magic V6 is a pretty clear win in our book.

This foldable is focused not on just being thinner for thinner’s sake, but on something that actually matters – battery life. Over the past few years, foldables have been focused almost entirely on being thinner, often at the expensve of longevity as we saw with last year’s Galaxy Z Fold 7. So Honor’s direction of not pushing to make a thinner device just for the sake of the title of “world’s thinnest” and instead addressing an actual pain point really goes a long way. Combine that with excellent cameras and advancements in the display such as improving the anti-reflective properties, and you’ve got a killer foldable.

The Honor Magic V6 is going on sale this month in China, and expanding to global markets (but not the US) in the coming months.

Honorable Mention: TCL NXTPAPER AMOLED

There was one another announcement that really caught our eye – quite literally – at MWC, and that was TCL’s NXTPAPER AMOLED upgrade.

NXTPAPER has quietly been one of the best display experiences out there for years, but it’s also been based on IPS LCD screens. TCL says that its next upgrade to NXTPAPER will be based on AMOLED displays, and an early demonstration of that shows just how big of an upgrade it will be. When Damien Wilde and myself walked into TCL’s booth, we were immediately blown away at how much better NXTPAPER AMOLED looks compared to the IPS LCD found in the new NXTPAPER 70 Pro. It’s more vibrant and drastically brighter, all while still delivering the anti-glare finish and easy-to-view displays we’ve loved about NXTPAPER.

The only downside for now is that we have no idea when this will arrive. The only device TCL had to show off was a proof-of-concept. But, for me at least, I can’t wait to see more.