By Rodney Brown

While Microsoft Corp. is apparently giving away peeks at its new Windows Phone 7 operating system and phones based on that platform by not weighing down the banners covering up its giant promo material (see the Engadget breaking story from earlier today with cool upskirt pics), local companies are making announcements as well at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.

Let’s start with Nuance Communications Inc. of Burlington. Nuance (Nasdaq: NUAN) announced an enhanced version of its handwriting technology for touch screens called Nuance T9 Write. The technology can also be used for pen-based devices and features multi-touch gesture and on-top writing capabilities — a feature that lets you write one word or letter right on top of the previous one, reducing the screen real estate needed. Nuance T9 Write also mixes handwriting input with Nuance XT9 predictive text technology to “enhance the recognition of naturally shaped letters, numbers, symbols and punctuation in more than 40 languages — predicting words as you write them.”

Coming out of Marlborough is Bitstream Inc. and the latest version of its mobile web browser, Bolt. The 1.7 release of Bolt adds new features such as direct Twitter integration, Spanish and Russian language support, an enhanced download manager, increased streaming video features and the ability to run widgets, according to Bitstream (Nasdaq: BITS) officials. The widgets will be available through a Bolt Widget Gallery and are written to comply with W3C widgets standards.

On the hardware side of things, Skyworks Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: SWKS) of Woburn is announcing a handful of new chips to be used in mobile devices. Among those are several highly integrated multimode power amplifier modules for 3G smart phones and data cards using high speed packet access (HSPA).

Stay tuned for more information throughout the day and let us know what new things you want to see announced in Barcelona.

Update, 11:44 a.m.: Red Bend Software Inc. is ironically announcing its vRapid Mobile Software Management Client, which allows carriers to centrally manage software and apps on smartphones that use open operating systems, with the first OS supported being Google Inc.’s Android. The irony comes from the fact that Waltham’s Red Bend sued Google in October of 2009 over a feature of Google’s Chrome browser. Allegedly, a function of Chrome that allows it to receive compressed software updates infringes one of the Waltham company’s patents on a method allowing wireless carriers to efficiently push out updates to mobile phone firmware — the basis of the vRapid suite of products. The new vRapid client is designed to work with any mobile OS under the Software Component Management Object (SCOMO) model. For now it only works with Android, but will soon support others under the SCOMO model, including Brew Mobile Platform, LiMo and Symbian.