2014 is the year of the smart watch - and the toothbrush

The Oral-B SmartSeries electric toothbrush at MWC 2014 Photograph: Xie Haining/Xinhua Press/Corbis

A new smart toothbrush unveiled this week could monitor how well you brush your teeth, and could one day be used to send data back to your dentist. Oral B’s Smartseries toothbrush, which launched in the UK in June priced at £199, sends data back to a smartphone app recording how many brushstrokes are used, targeting problem areas and following personalised brushing routines.
This vision of the internet-connected future was just one of the gadgets unveiled this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which kicked off with a keynote from an exuberant Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Explaining the company’s $19bn acquisition of the messaging app WhatsApp, MWC’s 75,000-strong audience was abuzz with what the deal would mean for mobile networks, and whether WhatsApp’s latest move into voice technology would threaten traditional mobile businesses.
For Facebook, expansion depends on gaining users in developing markets, where the mobile phone is king and mobile broadband outstrips traditional internet three to one, according to data from the International Telecommunication Union.
But it was the internet of things - connecting physical devices to the internet - preoccupying the discussions of mobile phone networks. The potential is vast, and operators are excited by potential expansion of providing data services to everything from toothbrushes and fridges to cars and washing machines.
“We currently have 13m devices connected to our network, of which 1.6m of those connections are machine-to-machine,” said Olaf Swantee, chief executive of EE talking to the Guardian. “We are working to grow those connections up to 32m and M2M connections are going to play a very big part in that.”
The goal is to turn everything into a smart, data-driven device. Cars could talk to the road about black ice, fridges could order food automatically when it runs out, or you could ask your washing machine “how are you getting on?” and the washing machine could reply “almost there sir, just on the spin cycle, I’ll be done in 15 minutes”.
These machine-to-machine (M2M) connections are expected to number 250m globally by the end of 2014, according to data from the GSMA. To support the vast number of devices networks are working on capacity and speed, so there were plenty of companies keen to show off hardware that enables super fast connectivity.
In another corner of the trade show South Korean Telecom demonstrated its next generation 4G mobile data network, which is capable of delivering speeds of up to 450 megabits per second – over three times as fast as the fastest standard UK home broadband. Nokia Solutions & Networks claimed to be the ultimate king of speed, supplying data at 2.6Gbps or 2,600Mbps. At that speed, a very large 4K ultra high definition film could be downloaded in seconds.
For the high street, however, the first wave of a more connected world will be yet more devices to track health and fitness.
South Korean giant Samsung launched three new smartwatches, the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and Gear Fit, each with a built in heart-rate monitor.
Signalling an increasingly intense battle between the mobile phone makers, Huawei also launched a fitness tracker for the wrist but that can convert to a headset to take phone calls. Sony already has a smartwatch and a fitness band, while both Motorola and HTC are working on a smart wearable.
Mobile World Congress 2014 may not have been the year that internet connected devices became mainstream, but it will certainly be remembered as the year of the smartwatch.