BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — In Russia, if you want to come up with a mascot for your company or a character for your app, there’s no focus groups or testing: it all comes from the top down.

That’s why when Russian app development and publishing company iFree wanted to release a new virtual assistant for Android and iOS to take on Siri, i-Free’s Kirill Petrov dictated the design of i-Free’s latest character. He would be an all white, gremlin-like humanoid with huge flashing teeth and glowing yellow eyes. He would hail from the planet Edelweiss (named after a beer), and he would come to Earth in the time-honored tradition of many alien invaders before him: namely to kidnap our women for his own lascivious pleasure.

Meet Spoony. He’s terrifying. He uses much of the same core technology as Siri, the distant relation he’d eventually like to kill, or at least surplant. Presumably after making out with her first.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — On the surface of things, Asus’s Eee Pad Transformer Prime is just a wonderfully swell idea. Why have both an ultrabook and tablet when you can have one that is both? What if you could take your iPad, snap it onto a keyboard + trackpad, and have a MacBook Air?

It’s a nice dream, and, in actuality, the Transformer Prime is a beautiful piece of hardware. But the challenges aren’t hardware: they lie in software. And in software, neither Android nor iOS is yet up to the challenge of driving both a mobile and laptop OS. But after Windows 8 sets the bar higher, they both could be.

Leap year comes but every four years and what better way to celebrate than with $100 off a 4G LTE device on Verizon. That’s exactly what Verizon is offering in their Leap Year Promo which will be running all day today. This deal is online only and discounts all 4G LTE devices by $100 for anyone signing up for a new 2-year contract and data plan. New customers will also be able to take advantage of Verizon’s double data promo which offers double the data allotment when you sign up for a data plan of 2GB or higher.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Fujitsu’s made the first Android phone that I, as an iPhone lover, found myself drooling over… which makes it a doubly good thing that the phone in question is waterproof. And not just waterproof! As thin and light and as perfect in the hand as a dream.

The only problems? Because of Fujitsu’s bizarre way of selling their devices, this phone, which has been on sale in Japan for months, doesn’t even have a set name. And forget about getting one Stateside. How does a company make a phone this beautiful and then have no idea how to market it?

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — Samsung is serious about its Galaxy Note hardware, and has had a rare fit of intense product focus. The Notes are being pushed as artists’ devices. This much is obvious from the artists painting people’s portraits in the Samsung booth, and the caricatures covering every surface like a kids pre-school scrawlings plastered on a proud parent’s fridge door. But Samsung has also got some great developers on board.