Mobile World Congress 2013: Samsung, Huawei, HP And Mozilla Make Early News (PICTURES)

The Mobile World Congress conference has kicked off in Barcelona, with an absolutely enormous Samsung mobile phone-tablet hybrid among the first announcements.

Samsung's Galaxy Note 8.0 was unveiled on Sunday, an eight-inch mobile device which still works as a mobile phone.

The almost hilariously-huge device is seen by observers as a 'brand play' if nothing else, emphasising the South Korean tech giant's ability to iterate quickly on its successful releases and provide its customers with a variety of choices.

It also comes with a quad-core processor, a 1,280 x 800 pixels screen and Samsung's 'S-Pen' stylus input.

But Samsung also had a surprise up its sleeve, revealing that its next flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, will be announced in New York on March 14.

Also making an early announcement at this years show was HP, who unveiled their return to making mobile devices.

The HP Slate 7 is a low-cost Android tablet in the style of the Nexus 7, with a 1,024 x 600 pixels display and a dual-core A9 processor.

Hauwei showed off the Ascend P2, which it said was the world's "fastest" mobile device, with a 4.7-inch screen and a 13 megapixels camera.

Meanwhile Mozilla has made a host of announcements about its Firefox Operating System including some of the first hardware that will run the new OS.

CEO Gary Kovacs said that the company was looking at 2014 as a potential release date for a device in the US, but that Brazil, Mexico and Spain would come first.

They include the ZTE Open and the Alcatel One Touch Fire.

Nvidia have been demonstrating their new Tegra 4i mobile chipset, while PowerbyProxi has shown of its new wireless charging solution.

Nokia and Sony will be among the companies making early announcements on Monday.