Microsoft is making its first big appearance at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in quite a while this year, and you'll be able to stream the company's keynote as it happens. Set to kick off on February 24 at 9 a.m. PT (12 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. CET), the keynote will feature "new innovations for the future of computing" with comments from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and HoloLens chief Alex Kipman.
You can follow along with the keynote live, tune in with the video embed above or at Microsoft's event site (opens in new tab).
What to expect
As for what we're expecting Microsoft to announce, all signs point to a second iteration of the company's HoloLens augmented reality headset. We're definitely not expecting any surprise phone announcements, but Kipman's involvement strongly hints at a HoloLens 2 reveal. That's far from certain, of course, but all we have to go off of is a slick, cryptic teaser video posted to YouTube last week by Kipman himself.
The original HoloLens has mostly enjoyed success as an enterprise tool, bolstering manufacturing processes, along with design and medical applications. The headset has even led to a lucrative $480 million contract with the U.S. military, which could lead the Army to eventually purchase upwards of 100,000 HoloLens units.
Given that the original HoloLens launched in 2016, a followup is hotly anticipated. It's already been confirmed that the HoloLens 2 will sport a custom Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) with an AI coprocessor, allowing it to natively implement deep neural networks to analyze objects and data without sending anything to the cloud. However, we expect several other improvements, including, potentially, a switch to an ARM processor and support for LTE.
Ultimately, we'll have to wait and see what Microsoft has in store for its MWC 2019 keynote.
