With only days ahead of the biggest mobile industry event kicks off in Barcelona, the product announcements are coming thick and fast.

With this year’s show looking to be an LTE, NFC, mobile billing and app monetisation bonanza, the Telecoms Tech team will be travelling to Barcelona over the weekend to bring you the latest news, announcements, gossip and product releases.

The latest manufacturer to lift the lid on its upcoming box of tricks is LG, which is planning to revitalise its smartphone brand with swanky new design and marketing.  The firm’s new L-Style phones, the Optimus L3, L5 and L7 (pictured), mark a design consious departure from more recent LG products, are expected to be touted heavily at next week’s Mobile World Congress.

 “With smartphones, we sometimes took a more functional approach to design but with L-Style we’re going back to our roots as a company focused on how our products fit into the lifestyle of our customers,” said LG Mobile CEO Jong-seok Park.

The “L-style” focuses on five major design elements: modern square style, “floating display” technology, more intuitive arrangement of keys, metallic accents and a “sensuous slim shape”.

The L5 and L7 will both launch with Android 4.0 in the first half the year and the L3 Gingerbread phone will be released in March.

Samsung has also announced a pair of new smartphones, running on Android Gingerbread. The Ace 2, and the Mini Galaxy 2; both budget devices compared to some of the tech giant’s more top tier offerings.

Ace 2 is the more sophisticated of the two, with a dual-core 800MHz processor, a 3.8-inch, 480×800-pixel screen, and 4GB of internal memory. There’s a 5-megapixel camera on the back, with a 640×480-pixel videocam on the front. Neither of these phones will ship with Android Ice Cream Sandwich, and it’s unclear if or when an update might become available.

Panasonic, meanwhile, has unveiled its first foray into the smartphone market for six years with the super-slim, waterproof and dustproof Eluga handset. The firm bowed out of the international phone arena in 2005 under after poor sales.

However, a saturated domestic market, and pressure from the likes of Apple, Samsung and low-cost Chinese competitors, has saw the Japanese firm announce in December that it would seek to exploit the massive global popularity of smartphones.

This good looking device sports a 4.3inch screen and a sleek 7.8mm profile that runs the length of the device. It supports NFC and runs on the Gingerbread version of Android, though an update to ICS is in the pipeline. The Eulga also switches to ‘eco mode’ when its battery is low, dropping non-essential processes to save power.

We will be at Mobile World Congress this year covering all the latest announcements, and getting our hands on the latest products. If you’re looking forward to a particular announcement, or you’ve got some big news of your own at this year’s show, let us know in the comments below.