“Early today I asked colleague Tim Conneally in group chat: “What happened to Mobile World Congress? One day of announcements and nothing else?” Because Day 2 is unusually light on product news,” Joe Wilcox writes for BetaNews. “Perhaps that’s good thing for participating vendors, because late [yesterday] morning Apple stole the show.”

“The Cupertino, Calif.-based company dispatched email invites for a March 7 event, presumably announcing iPad 3,” Wilcox writes. “Blogs and news stories that would have been written about MWC product announcements will go to Apple rumormongering and speculation. The gravity well is just too great.”

Wilcox writes, “Twitter buzz around #ipad and #ipad3 was so great Mashbable posted a 20-page slideshow of tweets. What? There’s no other news today? It’s this kind of response that sucks the soul out of trade shows like Mobile World Congress. Mashable editor Lance Ulanoff tweeted this morning: ‘Eric Schmidt is on stage at #MWC talking global tech gap, blissfully unaware of the Apple news that just blotted out the sun. #iPad’”

Read more in the full article here.