TECH TRENDS FOR 2018
A QUICK LOOK AT WHAT WAS TRENDING AT THIS YEAR’S MWC.
Most of the other big phone players — like LG, Motorola, Huawei and HTC — decided, perhaps wisely, to not compete with Samsung’s Galaxy S9 reveal at MWC this year, and while that meant there was a dearth of flagship handsets, it made way for the smaller manufacturers to show off their wares. And, embarassingly, almost all of them were in a race to copy a key design element of the iPhone X.
It seems everyone else wants to take a crack at the X’s characteristic notch, which juts out into the screen from the top of the bezel. Never before has the an iPhone feature been copied so quickly and blatantly. And while Apple’s use of the latter has a purpose, some Android implementations, like on the ASUS Zenfone 5, seem purely cosmetic — on the latter, it doesn’t even house the earpiece or the front camera.
While a revived 4G version of the very retro Nokia 8110 (AKA, ‘that slide-phone from The Matrix’) made an appearance, judging from what was on show at MWC, bezel-less handsets are definitely the way forward. A trend that began in 2016 will most likely become the norm if the tech featured in the Vivo Apex (below) gets adopted by manufacturers. So, as the desire for larger displays marries with the ability to drop the bezel, we may even see future phones getting a bit smaller without compromising on screen real estate.
Notably missing from this year’s Congress was innovation in the wearable tech sapce. Although there were a few companies that did show off a fairly predictable variety of fitness trackers and smartwatches, there didn’t really seem to be anything new, either in terms of either design or in the tech hiding under the hood.