Top 5 Trending Smartphone Features of 2018

The smartphone is a very saturated market and while shipments have indicated that it’s slowing down, vendors will continue to push for more innovation and new features in the hopes of capturing a bigger piece of the pie.

Here are 5 trending features that will become more common in smartphones this 2018.

The Notch.

While not really a feature, the notch has become a symbol of innovation. First introduced in the Essential phone, the notch became a prominent fixture with the release of the iPhone X.

This was not intentional, of course, but a by-product of efforts to expanding the screen real estate and reducing unnecessary bezels.??The new Zenfone 5 has it, as well as the upcoming Huawei P20, LG G7 Neo, Vivo V9, OPPO R15 and few other lesser-known brands like Leagoo, Doogee and Ulefone. We’ll certainly see more of these phones with the notch this year.

Four (4) Cameras.

Dual cameras have become the norm in 2017. In 2018, we’ll see more of them – dual, dual cameras or a pair each at the back and at the front.??Huawei originally introduced this in the Nova 2i, one of their more popular mid-range phones from last year.

If Huawei will continue to popularize this more of their phones, we might see other vendors do the same move.

AI.

Artificial Intelligence has become a buzzword in the smartphone industry in the last 6 to 12 months with Apple and Huawei leading the way with their AI-capable chipsets.

With Qualcomm joining the bandwagon, we’ll certainly see more Snapdragon-powered smartphones from other vendors brandishing the same feature. Asus has already revealed in the Zenfone 5 running on the Snapdragon 636.

Face Recognition.

As an alternative security feature to the fingerprint scanner, facial recognition has been added as an additional layer of security.?The facial recognition became more useful when Apple decided to completely take out the fingerprint scanner from the iPhone X. This leaves the facial recognition technology as the sole biometric function for most of the security requirements.

Apple did a very good implementation of facial recognition on the iPhone X that many other smartphone vendors are starting to incorporate face recognition into their new devices. This feature should slowly become a standard offering in most smartphones this year.

In-display fingerprint scanner. While facial recognition is a viable alternative to the fingerprint scanner but it seems they’ve found a better solution.

By integrating the sensor directly under the display, the smartphone can retain fingerprint scanner on the front panel without taking away space from the active display. This was shown to work quite well with the Vivo X20 Plus UD and the Doogee V, both of which uses in-display sensor developed by Synaptics.

Vivo also showed a concept phone called Apex during the recent MWC in Barcelona. It uses a more advanced sensor that spans almost half the entire bottom display of the phone.

With more smartphones coming out that have a very high screen-to-body ratio, the idea of incorporating the fingerprint scanner could be a compelling proposition so we should see more of them later this year.