Modern smartphones — trends | Articles | Phones

The smart­phone mar­ket is chang­ing at an incred­i­ble pace. New smart­phones appear sev­er­al times a year, and each brings some­thing new. Trends either take root or dis­ap­pear for­ev­er. We can only observe, so we have col­lect­ed sev­er­al inter­est­ing fac­tors that have every chance to take root and set the direc­tion for the fur­ther devel­op­ment of the mar­ket.

Source: Lifewire

More screens and more screens

If you’ve been fol­low­ing trends late­ly, you’ve prob­a­bly noticed how much atten­tion man­u­fac­tur­ers pay to dis­plays. If only because smart­phone screens are get­ting big­ger. At the same time, com­pa­nies are striv­ing to main­tain a rea­son­able size so that the smart­phone fits in the hand, and it can still be con­trolled with one palm. Stan­dard sizes today range from 5.8 to 6.5 inch­es, but there are also mod­els with a larg­er dis­play, such as the Sam­sung Galaxy Note10+, which has a 6.8‑inch screen.

But the trend towards larg­er screens moved in a very unex­pect­ed direc­tion, when at the begin­ning of 2019 sev­er­al com­pa­nies announced the release of fold­ing smart­phones at once — these are the Sam­sung Galaxy Fold and Mi Flex from Xiao­mi. In addi­tion, accord­ing to rumors, Sam­sung is devel­op­ing anoth­er smart­phone with two dis­plays, and Xiao­mi is plan­ning to cre­ate Mi Mix Alpha, a smart­phone whose dis­play wraps around the body.

How this will be accept­ed by the pub­lic is still hard to imag­ine — fold­able smart­phones are def­i­nite­ly of inter­est, because they can turn into tablets, and the thin­ner the body can be made, the more ben­e­fits the user will receive.

Source: first­post

More cameras

Mobile cam­eras became a resound­ing suc­cess almost imme­di­ate­ly, and with the advent of new social net­works such as Insta­gram and Vine, videos and pho­tos tak­en with smart­phone cam­eras have even become a way of earn­ing mon­ey for many. Man­u­fac­tur­ers of mobile devices imme­di­ate­ly respond­ed to the increased demand with new devel­op­ments and, grad­u­al­ly, the pres­ence of three cam­eras — two main ones and a front one — became the stan­dard. But today, almost all brands are striv­ing not only to improve the qual­i­ty of cam­eras, but also to increase their num­ber. The new flag­ship iPhone mod­els get 3 cam­eras each, Xiao­mi even equips its new prod­ucts with four and five cam­eras, plus at least two front ones. Every­thing is very log­i­cal here, because each cam­era gets its own sen­sor with sep­a­rate tasks: tele­pho­to, wide-angle, macro, por­trait, etc. But the trend does not stop at all, on the con­trary, there are more and more cam­eras. The result is get­ting high­er and high­er.

The only iron­ic thing about this trend is that one of the lead­ers in mobile pho­tog­ra­phy, Google Pix­el, is in no hur­ry to increase the num­ber of cam­eras, focus­ing on paired soft­ware that allows you to cre­ate high-qual­i­ty pho­tos even in the dark. This is clear­ly illus­trat­ed by the exam­ple of the Google Pix­el 3XL.

Source: ROG — Asus

Gaming features

Smart­phones have long ceased to be “dialers” and just a device for access­ing online. Now their pos­si­bil­i­ties are much high­er, and it has already reached the point that mobile games have their own cat­e­gories. So in a sense, a mod­ern smart­phone should be anal­o­gous to a gam­ing PC. That is why smart­phones get improved proces­sors, more RAM and more built-in. If quite recent­ly the stan­dard ratio was 3/16GB, today it is already 6/128GB or 8/256GB. The fact is that high­er qual­i­ty pho­tos take up more mem­o­ry, but also that it is need­ed to down­load heavy games. There­fore, the per­for­mance and bench­mark results should be high­er and high­er. Of course, the cool­ing sys­tem in smart­phones is also improv­ing, because dur­ing the game they heat up, like any oth­er equip­ment. And in order to avoid lags and over­heat­ing, devices are equipped with tricky cool­ers. An exam­ple of this trend in prac­tice is Red­mi Note 8. With a visu­al pre­mi­um, the smart­phone is strong­ly aimed at a gam­ing audi­ence. But there are also spe­cial gam­ing smart­phones, such as the Asus ROG phone. Even their design is more rem­i­nis­cent of a gam­ing PC than a famil­iar smart­phone.

Source: Mash­able

Larger battery

To say that all man­u­fac­tur­ers are striv­ing to increase bat­tery capac­i­ty would not be entire­ly fair. While some like Xiao­mi or One­Plus are real­ly increas­ing smart­phone bat­tery capac­i­ty, oth­ers like Apple and Sam­sung are hon­ing the pow­er con­sump­tion of the smart­phone itself. It turns out with vari­able effi­cien­cy. iPhones are not par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­tin­guished by long-term work, and even dur­ing the day the user some­times has to recharge the faith­ful smart­phone. At the same time, devices from Xiao­mi and Huawei may well work for one, and some­times two days, with not very effi­cient oper­a­tion. Of course, each com­pa­ny solves this issue in its own way, but this does not change the main fac­tor — every­one wants to extend the bat­tery life of the smart­phone for the max­i­mum peri­od, and this desire is quite under­stand­able.

Source: Nasi Lemak Tech

Wireless headphones or jack?

An inter­est­ing sit­u­a­tion has devel­oped with head­phones. After Apple quite loud­ly refused to place a 3.5mm head­phone jack on the new iPhones, fans were divid­ed into two camps. Some admit­ted that the deci­sion was jus­ti­fied and pur­chased brand new wire­less head­phones from Apple. Oth­ers have aban­doned the iPhone and start­ed look­ing for oth­er options. Since then, oth­er com­pa­nies have been very cau­tious about this deci­sion. Big­ger and more estab­lished ones such as Sam­sung, Huawei and oth­ers have rushed to sup­port the tran­si­tion to the new sys­tem, and even invent­ed their own head­phones, true wire­less with Blue­tooth con­nec­tion. But com­pa­nies that have remained true to the tra­di­tions, such as Xiao­mi, have so far ignored this trend, which gives the impres­sion that it is they who lis­ten to the pub­lic more and take pub­lic opin­ion into account. Be that as it may, we should expect that soon­er or lat­er wire­less head­phones will still take over.

Source: Oscarmi­ni

Fingerprints and facial recognition

Face ID is a mil­lion dol­lar devel­op­ment. Indeed, you will not find such a well-thought-out face recog­ni­tion sys­tem any­where except for Apple. Ana­logues appear in oth­er com­pa­nies, but there are always some dis­ad­van­tages. This does not mean that devel­op­ments stop, since 3D recog­ni­tion has appeared and, for sure, more advanced devel­op­ments will be found in the next mod­els.

But the fin­ger­print scan­ner is not going any­where. On the con­trary, many man­u­fac­tur­ers, such as Sam­sung, have found an excel­lent alter­na­tive and remove the scan­ner under the screen. Thus, free­ing up space and allow­ing us to use the famil­iar and reli­able method of unlock­ing the smart­phone. It is dif­fi­cult to say where this trend will devel­op, but so far no one has can­celed fin­ger­print entry.

This is what the most pop­u­lar mobile design trends look like. With each new smart­phone, they will change, but we will con­tin­ue to fol­low the news.