It has been a mostly boring year for smartphones. For the first time in history, smartphone sales figures across the US declined last year. Things just aren't the same anymore, with flagships touting the same features and no real substantial improvement. The ones which offer anything over your previous smartphones cost a fortune. But all is not lost. There's still hope for the smartphone industry, and here are some of the trends you might see this year.
Gaming smartphones
Up till now, Smartphones only had a few market segments for covering price ranges. But with the arrival of the Razer phone, the market changed gradually. Earlier this year, we saw the Xiaomi Blackshark and ZTE Red Magic release. ASUS has already promised the release of the ROG phone in the near future, and a plethora of accessories to support the gaming-focused smartphone. All of this has been kicked off with the release of PUBG on mobile platforms for completely free. Expect to see a lot more of these gaming smartphones arrive in the coming days.
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Face recognition
Face recognition tech has been around for years, and it was expected to hit the mass market with the release of the iPhone X. We might have seen the implementation of it on the OPPO F7 and the One Plus 5T, but none of these were nearly as secure. Another patent from Samsung suggests their work on a biometric camera which uses both the iris scanner and 3D face recognition tech.
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Malleable displays
The concept first started a long time ago, back in 2013 when Samsung revealed a foldable AMOLED Panel which functioned amazingly even after 100,000 bends. The project eventually took form as Samsung Galaxy X, and now it's closer than ever. And Samsung isn't the only one running this race, last year Microsoft patented a foldable display, presumably for its Surface phone. LG even patented a flexible display with a smartpen, hinting towards its attempts at catching up with the world.
Even more cameras
One of the most significant smartphone cameras of 2018 was the Huawei P20 Pro with three cameras. Chinese brand Light recently is boasting about a smartphone with 9 cameras and 13 lenses. Google's Pixel supposedly disagrees, with leaked renders pointing towards another single-camera setup, relying on Google's astonishing post-process magic to do justice to those portrait-mode pictures. But companies like Samsung and LG have already fallen to the trend, with LG supposedly working on the LG V40 with three cameras on its back.