This year’s Mobile World Congress kicked off Monday in a brand new venue in Barcelona. As the show closed yesterday, here’s a roundup of what we read and observed from our meeting room in Hall 2.

Handsets, Handsets and More Handsets – The Seattle Times reported on the various handset announcements from the Windows 8 Pro, Nokia’s Lumia 520 and 720 and the Samsung Galaxy S 4.

Handsets and Tablets Collide – Wired reported that tablets are a big trend at this year’s conference as Samsung debuted its Galaxy Note 8.0 – an 8-inch, 1280 x 800 display with the ability to be assigned a phone number and make calls.

And Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported on “The 3 Most-Important Things at Mobile World Congress” which included infrastructure tech, automaker apps and handset austerity.

Of course we also consider infrastructure tech to be one of the most important parts of Mobile World Congress, with our own Open Channel launch covered by RCRWireless.

More handsets, the crossover of phone-enabled tablets and more apps mean increased signaling and traffic on the wireless network. Mobile traffic management and optimization are top concerns for the team here at SEVEN and given these headlines from this year’s Mobile World Congress, it appears 2013 will be yet another heavy year for the network. Stay tuned for more on these coming trends and technologies.