The Best of GLOMO Awards 2017 - Global Mobile Awards

The GLOMO (Global Mobile) Awards have also taken place alongside the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This year, the awards have featured new categories, such as the Best Mobile App for the Connected Lifestyle, or the Best Mobile App for Business. While there were many categories, each presenting the award to the most worthy company or startup, here are the most important ones.

The title of Best Innovative Mobile App has been awarded to Sliide Airtime Africa. While it doesn’t affect worldwide users, Sliide Airtime has a huge effect on the connectivity rates in Nigeria, and will soon open for South African users. What Sliide Airtime does is send news and ads to every user’s lock screen, and use 65% of the ad revenue to purchase more data for the users so they get free extended online usage.

The Best Overall Mobile App (Judge’s Choice) award was presented to none other than last summer’s pop culture phenomenon, Pokemon Go. Having been downloaded over 650 million times and rapidly expanding its roots into pop culture, the game has received praise not only for its ingenious way of combining augmented reality and GPS usage in order to create fun and engaging gameplay, but also for the way it managed to get people walking around their cities in order to catch Pokemon.

Orange’s VR1 virtual reality gadget has received the Best Wearable Mobile Technology award for providing a premium VR experience at an affordable price. Sony’s newly revealed Xperia XZ Premium, which is extremely over-specced for the current state of the market, has also received an award, namely the Best New Mobile Handset, Tablet or Device at MWC 2017.

Given that many of the keynotes hosted at MWC 2017 put a huge emphasis on 5G connectivity and its future, the biggest pioneers in this field were rewarded. Therefore, the popular Chinese company Huawei has received the Outstanding Contribution for LTE Evolution to 5G, as they have made huge efforts in aiding the telecommunications market to make the transition to 5G. In the same category, Huawei has also received the Best Mobile Infrastructure and Best Technology Enabler awards, marking the beginning of a new golden age for the telecommunication company.

American company Altiostar presented the world’s first virtualized Radio Access Network technology, which enables operators to reduce the customer churn and offer a better return on investment while rolling out 5G. This technology has brought them the Best Mobile Technology Breakthrough and Outstanding Overall Mobile Technology – The CTO’s Choice awards.

In order to end the article on an unexpected note, there was an award given to the Government of Pakistan, namely the Government Leadership Award, for the fact that they are actively consulting with the industry as they roll out their new regulatory reforms.

All in all, the GLOMO awards were an exciting part of the Mobile World Congress for tech enthusiasts and fans of anything mobile: from Pokemon Go to the Government of Pakistan, it can be argued that the awards were very comprehensive.