10 of the strangest, coolest, and most terrifying things we saw at Mobile World Congress 2012

Looking out at the sea of businessmen pushing their way through to the next meeting, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Mobile World Congress (MWC) is a bit of a stuffy affair.

However, dig a little deeper into the many halls that comprise the exhibition area around the Fira and you'll find a lot of very odd things going on in between all those important deals being sealed (or whatever it is business people do when they're not walking very slowly in front of me).

Here's our top selection of the weirdest, coolest, and downright bizarre things we spotted in between looking at loads of similar-looking hardware.

This one made absolutely no sense until I spied an advert for Huawei's Ascend P mobile on the very final day of the conference (it's used in the advert).

To be honest, though, building a huge winged horse out of smartphones to represent the speed of the device still doesn't make all that much sense, but it did look rather swell placed on its raised plinth in front of the palace.

I did start feeling sorry for the security guard employed to stop people stroking its touchscreen surface, however, as he looked like he had been slow-roasted by Thursday evening.

If there's one thing you can say about Google's wee green Android mascot, it's that it's a very cute little fellow.

You can't, however, say that about the Terminator-esque jewel-encrusting machine The Big G placed on its stand, which sat there pounding gems onto smartphone backs for the duration of MWC.

Maybe if Google had put some covering over the lower mouth, it would appear less menacing, though maybe any machine that whirs and stamps with eerily forceful precision can't ever be considered particularly friendly looking.

Whatever the reason for the terrifying appearance of this bot, I fled shortly after taking this video in case it smashed its way out of its prison and started killing people with its huge cube-like hands.

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Nokia managed to pull off a trick that even Keyser Söze would have been proud of when it revealed the 808 PureView at MWC this year - it had people writing about a new Symbian smartphone.

Okay, to be fair, the interested parties were mainly writing about its unique feature: a 41-megapixel (yes, 41!) camera that could take such high-fidelity shots that it would fare quite well against Blade Runner's image-enhancement device in a pan-and-scan contest. Yeah, you know the scene.

What Nokia didn't do, however, was put particularly long cords on the handsets. So, in my attempt to take an image that consisted of more than just a white desk, I set off the incredibly loud alarm and had everyone looking at me like I was a thief.

Cheers for that, Nokia.

After the sea of suits, the second most common sight at MWC 2012 was that of the big green Google Android.

Some of these 'droids were just chillin', walking along with a human handler and posing for photos. Other times, they were getting down to a DJ set, doing the bump, and flapping their arms about in a slightly insane fashion.

There was one especially surreal moment where two people dressed as Batman and Catwoman joined in, too. I'm not even sure why they were there, to be honest, but it made a little more sense than the Huwai Pegasus.

In fairness to Microsoft, the company's "Smoked by Windows Phone" campaign (meant to demonstrate how much faster the OS is compared to rivals) once again went very well for the firm, with Windows Phone handsets winning the vast majority of match-ups against Android and iOS devices.

What's funny, though, is seeing that one of the phones that did manage to 'smoke' Windows was none other than the three-year-old HTC Hero.

I suspect the person using the Hero had quite a lot of shortcuts and widgets installed specifically for the challenge (there was €100 riding on the outcome, after all).

Last year, it took literally two days before everyone realised it might be a good idea to collect the little pin badges Google had given to its partners and flog them on eBay to rabid Android fanboys.

This year, it took approximately five minutes.

Annoyingly, it seemed that most of the time it was the staff on the Android partner stands that were stockpiling, with practically every exhibitor walking around with hundreds of different designs pinned to his badge straps.

At least you'll now know that the guy selling the complete set on eBay is likely to be a fairly senior member of Nvidia, LG, or Samsung.

Last year's editions pictured. Yes, I know.

I don't normally get to see those big protests in person, given I live out in Cambridge where the most exciting thing is watching tourists on punts fall into the river.

So, it was a bit exciting to find myself not only walking through one, but also partially the target of said protest.

Sadly, it wasn't a very well-populated protest when I waded through, with just a few dozen people stood around chanting something in Spanish and waving rather makeshift cardboard signs that denounced capitalism.

There was, however, a lot of armed police. So many of them, in fact, that I completely forgot to take a photo while I was outside. Annoying.

Almost everyone at MWC who wasn't a journalist was wearing some kind of smart attire, whether that was a full-on suit, or just a smart jacket.

There was one exception: Peter Vesterbacka (a.k.a. The Mighty Eagle). Rovio's CMO seemed to spend the entire event wearing a red hoodie.

It wasn't just any old hoodie, mind, but a new (and presumably not yet on sale) Angry Birds Space hoodie, with the slightly menacing eyes from the first teaser image staring back at onlookers.

However, while Rovio can normally slip fairly easily into the crowd at most mobile events, the bright red top was a pretty big giveaway in Barcelona.

Indeed, given that our very own Jon Jordan kept being stopped while wearing an old Angry Birds T-shirt by people presuming he was from Rovio, I'd hazard a guess and say Vesterbacka was the most interrupted person at the event.

If you've ever looked at an image of a pretty lady in an advert and thought, "man, I wish they would suddenly leap out from the image and start posing seductively at me", you're in luck.

UK company Aurasma was at MWC demonstrating its new augmented reality app that, after an incredibly short pause, suddenly made a Marks & Spencer lingerie advert leap into life, with the woman holding roses and dancing around the advertising banner like those magic newspapers in Harry Potter.

And when the Aurasma bods held their iPhones up to the MWC entrance badge, it instantly changed into a live feed of tweets containing the #MWC2012 hashtag. Not as seductive as the lady in lingerie, sure, but very cool. And very clever.

Eric Schmidt is no Steve Jobs when it comes to keynotes (who is?), but the Google keynote is usually good for both some light entertainment and for a few interesting revelations.

This year, however, was just really weird.

It started off well, with the company demonstrating some natty features of the Chrome browser, like pre-loading pages you're most likely to visit next, thereby overcoming the particularly throttled wi-fi access inside the Fira.

However, the remaining 30 minutes were noteworthy only for containing one of the strangest rambling speeches delivered by a tech CEO in a long time, which took in everything from Syrian political rights to vague predictions about future technology.

When it reached the part about how we'd all have robot doppelgängers that we could send to music gigs in our place, I closed my netbook.