In Pictures: Hottest products at Mobile World Congress 2013

Lightning-fast mobile device charging Well, not quite that fast. Qualcomm announced version 2.0 its Quick Charge technology, first introduced in 2012 to speed recharging of mobile devices by up to 40%.

Now it’s even faster: the vendor says its lab tests show tablets that usually took over 7 hours to recharge, took less than 3 with Quick Charge 2.0. The technology is embedded in the device and its companion charging device. It will be available first on devices using Qualcomm’s high-end Snapdragon system-on-chip, sometime in early 2014, according to the company. And all the 1.0 and 2.0 products are backward and forward compatible.