We have previously written about the trends followed by smartphone manufacturers in 2019. Among them were driving cameras, display fantasies, and more. But it's too late to talk about the outgoing year. Let's discuss the upcoming one. Surely manufacturers will push their ideas in a certain direction. Most likely, there will be several such directions. Let's try to figure out and predict how we will be attracted by world-famous manufacturers and their more modest pursuers with big ambitions.
We don't know what smartphones of the future will be, but very interesting.
Camera in smartphone screen
I have already shared my opinion on how manufacturers are trying to hide the smartphone camera and what this leads to. This time, personally, I have a clear feeling that in the new year, the trend will be to “pack” the camera under the screen. Leaks have already confirmed the existence of such technologies, but there have not yet been real samples on the wide market.
You see a dot on the screen. This is a camera.
Many years ago I was convinced that hybrid cars were a dead-end branch of the evolution of the automotive industry. The real future belongs to all-electric vehicles. When it comes to smartphones, I have about the same premonitions. It seems to me that a camera with mechanization comparable to the wing of a long-range aircraft is only a temporary solution. The hour will come and the camera will hide under the screen. At the same time, as soon as one person implements this, the rest will catch up. This will most likely happen in 2020.
From some of my acquaintances I heard phrases like, “I don't need a front camera at all.” Maybe this is so, but it does not bother manufacturers that will not develop and promote a smartphone for one percent of users. If that one percent were guaranteed to buy a smartphone for $ 2,000, it would make sense, but the proportion of such buyers would be negligible. Even I hardly use a front-facing camera, but I certainly would not buy such a smartphone. Even having a completely frameless screen would not have been an argument for me.
The bottom line is simple! The camera will definitely be on the screen. Most likely, this will happen in the coming year. Once someone does it, it becomes a trend.
Budget foldable smartphone
This year, the largest market players launched their foldable smartphones. They haven't gone mainstream yet, but I'm sure they will. Such devices are really convenient. You just need to decide something with the release form. For example, the variant from Motorola looks significantly more interesting than the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X. Even the fact that the second generation of the “fold”, according to rumors, will develop differently, only confirms my opinion.
The most interesting thing is that as soon as manufacturers convince the buyer that they need such a smartphone, and this can be done by means of reducing the price, and it will go. Manufacturers of state employees will immediately begin to catch up. For them, this will be a particularly tasty morsel, because they are constantly trying to jump out of their price and somehow attract attention to themselves.
Galaxy Fold 2 could be the most beautiful phone of 2020
This was the case with two cameras, with “bangs”, with a fingerprint scanner in the screen and much more. Even if it turns out later that folding display technology is not needed, all the same, everyone wants to stand out from the competition, and we have at least a year or two to enjoy it.
Smartphones with 5G
It's no secret that manufacturers of telecommunications equipment and smartphones are actively conquering new horizons of fifth-generation communication networks. We have already written about this in detail – you can read about the advantages of this technology.
In a nutshell, fifth-generation networks will greatly change not only the speed and quality of the connection, but also provide fundamentally new opportunities for using networks. In 2019, many manufacturers released smartphones with 5G. It even ran like a red thread through MWC 2019. In 2020, the expansion of fifth-generation networks will continue and there will be more and more smartphones with its support. And the increase in the number of smartphones will lead to an increase in coverage. You don't have to be a “cap” to understand that this is a trend not even for 2020, but for many years to come.
If 5G works all over the world, then we'll live.
For some reason, it also seems to me that the appearance of 5G in iPhone will become a certain boundary. When Apple moves its fan base to the new standard, operators will have little to do but promote new networks and purchase equipment. Don't think it's that simple though. In addition to the purchase of equipment, it is also necessary to agree with the governments of different countries on the allocation of frequencies for the operation of this equipment. This is where bureaucratic delays begin.
New generation displays
Above, I already said that foldable smartphones have every chance of becoming the gadgets of the future. Even if this is the case, there is no need to say that all smartphones will be foldable. All the same, conventional displays will remain, and so they just may undergo changes that originate with the Samsung Galaxy S6. This year, they are starting to gradually break into trends.
I'm talking about waterfall displays. Several models with such a screen have already been released this year. According to rumors, at the beginning of the year, OnePlus will catch up with its even more extravagant solution. This display allows you to create the effect of even more immersion in what is happening on the screen.
Perhaps this is just an attempt to surprise the audience.
Many people say that when using a waterfall screen, there will be a lot of accidental touching of the edges. I will say that this is not entirely true. I dealt with the Huawei Mate 30 Pro and VIVO Nex 3 and did not notice that the number of accidental touches was at least significantly higher than those in ordinary smartphones. There are special algorithms that allow you to exclude from processing touches that begin, as it were, outside the work area. This was used in the first generation Xiaomi Mi MIX and now works even better.
The only thing I didn't like was that, for example, in Huawei Mate 30 Pro, the Power button is too close to the back wall. Because of this, the grip of the smartphone becomes unstable when trying to press it. In addition, the use of touch volume control looks interesting, but I am for buttons, I am for hardcore. In VIVO Nex 3, the most of everything is realized “on a wheelbarrow” and I have even more questions for him.
Fastest charging
The last thing that, in my opinion, will definitely be in the trend of the year in the smartphone industry will be fast charging. You can even say that this is a worthy answer to the impossibility of increasing the battery capacity. Indeed, why do we need a larger battery when it can be charged just instantly. What do you say if the smartphone charges faster than you brush your teeth in the morning and, at the same time, it lasts for a day? I think this is great.
Later, “charging from air” will appear, when the smartphone is charged at a distance of several meters from the base station. Such stations can be located everywhere – on buses, in offices, in cafes, in shops, and so on. The battery will only be needed to get from one station to another. With this development of events, we will generally forget about the need to do something with the smartphone. It will just work, but it's too early to talk about it. It is rather a trend of the decade.
But technologies for really fast charging over the wire already exist. The representatives of the BBK group were especially successful in this. First, OnePlus amazed everyone with its Dash Charge, then they began to pull up OPPO and VIVO with their solutions. As a result, now you will not surprise anyone by charging a 4000 mAh battery in 30-35 minutes. And VIVO showed at all that this can be done in a little more than 10 minutes. This result will completely suit me.
Evidence of the movement towards faster charging was also the fact that Apple, which until this year put in a box with iPhone for 100K + power adapter for 1A, changed its approach. Starting with iPhone 11 Pro, the company has become generous with fast charging and now puts it in the kit. It cannot be called the fastest, but it certainly works at about the level of the leaders in this indicator.
Would you say that such speeds affect safety? But no! Have you heard a lot about OnePlus, OPPO or VIVO battery explosion? Me not. There were battery explosions on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and since then many are afraid of this, but then the problem was different.
What will a smartphone be like in 2020?
One thing is for sure: smartphones will be cool in 2020, and manufacturers will continue to actively promote what they have. Moreover, we have to fight for the buyer and against the background of the global decline in demand for smartphones caused by market saturation, we will have to fight more actively. And most importantly, he will have to be surprised.
Maybe smartphones in 2020 will be like that, but maybe not.
So far, it's not working out very well, since what really surprises is expensive, but the more manufacturers develop their technologies and pay for them with growing sales, the cheaper they will become. A simple example is that even now in relative state employees there is something that a couple of years ago was only in expensive flagships. Let's see how things go, but the first year of the new decade will definitely bring us something interesting!