Even with the declining sales and shipping of smartphones, in many ways 2018 was a great year for smartphones. We saw the (innovative?) pop-up camera, the futuristic in-display fingerprint scanner, the talk for 5G, a lot of AIs and so on. We tolerated the truly hated notch (FYI I don’t mind the notch very much), we got larger phones, and we are losing our beloved headphone jack.
And with CES 2019 just wrapping up with a few smartphones on show, here are the top 8 smartphone trends that smartphone industry is looking to embrace:
Camera Holes
With the push for fully immersive and bezel less display the notch was introduced by Apple on the iPhone X and as expected all other manufactures followed suit. But since becoming the genuinely hated feature of smartphone in 2018 the ‘notch’ life is coming to an end being replaced by ‘camera holes’. We have already seen Honor View 20 and Huawei Nova 4 with such display and the most awaited phone of 2019, the Samsung Galaxy S10 is expected to come with a camera hole in its display probably with other manufactures following it.
5G
4G LTE is no doubt the fastest network and it has been for a long time now. But this year might just change that will 5G rolling out. The new smartphone chips coming out (SD 855 namely and the upcoming chip from Apple) brings support for 5G which will make your smartphones network even better and faster than before. However even though we are likely to see 5G this year it might not be full fledged until late 2020.
Camera, Camera, Camera, Camera and Camera
2018 saw rise in the number of cameras a smartphone came with and no doubt the number will only increase in 2019 with the Nokia 9 Pureview tipped to come with whopping 5 rear cameras. The Samsung Galaxy A9(2018) is the phone with the most rear cameras at 4 but it will likely get toppled this year. The smartphone cameras have been really impressive throughout 2018 and with more number hopefully it will get even better. Google’s Pixel 4 might disagree with that though.
Foldable Phones
Samsung recently showed its foldable phone and a commercial foldable phone is already in the market which users can buy and various other OEMs are supposedly working on their own foldable phones with Huawei and LG likely to reveal theirs somewhere around MWC this year . And news broke out that Xiaomi is working on its own foldable phone with three panels. The foldable phones might be pricey though.
AI
We saw a lot of AIs in 2018. AI camera, AI assistant, AI chip and etcetera. And we have seen AI come to a fruition in lot of ways but the term AI is still being thrown haphazardly and hopefully this year it will change. Dedicated Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are coming with most of the chips this year with Apple’s A12 Bionic adopting it last year and Huawei’s last year’s 970 and this year’s 980 chip being the prominent example. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 also comes with dedicated NPU and what its significance is that it can understand the user’s behavior and perform based on that understanding. It will help with conserving battery, the AI scene recognition in cameras, optimizing the phone performance, helping out with AR and such and hopefully something even more better.
10 GB RAM
2018 was the year for 8 GB of RAM and I think it OEMs will opt for more, 10GB of RAM. We have already had phones with 10 GB of RAM like OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition, MI Mix 3, Xiaomi Black Shark Helo, and Vivo Nex Dual Display Edition. And this year 10 GB of RAM will come with more prominent phones like Samsung Galaxy S10 and Huawei P30 lineups with LG in tow. There is clearly no need for such large amount of memory for your phone but no harm no foul eh?
In-display Fingerprint Sensor
Ever since the Vivo Nex concept phone showed us the futuristic looking in-display fingerprint display everyone’s been smitten by it. Sure it is slower than traditional physical fingerprint sensor but you can’t deny that this will take over the traditional one and in 2019 in-display fingerprint will become a mainstream feature. Oneplus and Huawei have already adopted and other will surely follow this trend. Also, it looks way cooler with various customization and that you can unlock your phone by touching your screen.
Dual Display/Sliding Phones
Though sliding phones are nothing new and have been around for more than a decade this trend is now back and its getting better than ever. On the other hand dual display’s are somewhat just a farce you can’t say no to a phone that has screen on both the front and the back. And we are likely to see more devices with these two features as we inch more and more toward that fully immersive front display without any notch and camera holes. I mean just look at this device:
So these are the smartphone features that are to come into highlight this year. Other than these, what other features are you excited about? Let me know in the comments below.
TECHVITA 