Mobile World Congress has just taken place in Barcelona and we seen lots of new announcements from most of the major mobile phone manufactures. Samsung showed us the Galaxy S2 the updated version of the very popular version 1, with 25 million handset sales in 2010 alone. The Galaxy S2 comes with some nice new specs like an 4.3 inch Super AMOLED Plus screen, 8 megapixel camera and the dual core processor that you’ll read about on many websites but one feature that wasn’t widely reported is the mobile high-definition video link or MHL for short.

Now you might be wondering what MHL is and what it will do? Well let me explain. Handsets are getting thinner and smaller and many manufactures are finding it difficult to find space for certain things, basically what the MHL dose is instead of having ports for a microUSB and microHDMI on their devices this port will allow you to have both using the one port. The phone can recognise the difference when connecting to a PC or a TV. Over the next year you can expect MHL to become a standard on some phones and we will also see TV’s with a MHL ports so you can connect and show video from your phone.

There is however one issue at present, the TV will not charge the phone once you connect and start playing video. You’ll need to ensure that you have the battery fully charged or connect a power adapter between your GS2 and the TV.

About the MHL Standard

Back in 2008 a company called Silicon Image came up with the idea to work on a new standard for HDMI because they where not satisfied with the miniHDMI connector that had been created when the HDMI 1.3 standard was launched. MiniHDMI uses 19 pins to connect where the Mobile High Definition Link (MHL) simple uses 5.

There’s now a consortium of companies working with this standard namely Nokia, Samsung, Toshiba and Sony. In 2011 we will see more devices appearing like mobile phones and TV’s. There are also plans for version 2.0 which will have new features like increased power charging and compressed multi channel high-end audio.

Other Features on The Samsung Galaxy S2

• 4.3-inch SAMOLED2 display at 1280×720 and 340 dpi
• 2 GHz CPU
• 1 GB RAM, 4 GB ROM, 32 GB storage with microSD slot for cards up to 32 GB
• 8 MP camera with full HD video recording
• Bluetooth 3.0, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, A-GPS
• Accelerometer, gyroscope, proximity and all the other Android standards
• Running Android 3.0 OS