Top 5 Trends at Mobile World Congress 2018

The Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona ended yesterday, at which smartphone makers boasted of their latest achievements. This year, the focus was on the presentation of the Samsung Galaxy S9. But in this model, nothing new was shown “wow” - they just improved the camera and the S8 iron. But we noticed several other useful and interesting trends in the mobile industry. They can tell what devices we will use in a few years.

1. Frames around screens are fading.

Smartphones with a minimal, barely noticeable frame in 2017 were also released - two or three market leaders. But now they have become quite practical and inexpensive in production, so that almost all companies will switch to them. Most of the new smartphones presented at the MWC-2018 turned out to be “frameless”. Apparently, soon devices with thick pieces of plastic on top and bottom of the screen can only be found in historical museums.

The result is that Asus is already launching a flagship with a 6.2-inch screen, which is smaller in form factor than previous gadgets with a 5.5-inch screen. Moreover, such a transformation happened just in a year between Asus Zenfone 5 and Asus Zenfone 4. Even Sony, known for its “fat” models, this year significantly reduced the scope of the Xperia XZ2. Almost all state employees went in the same direction.

2. Nokia is not afraid to shake old

Finnish HDM Global, in 2016, bought Nokia from Microsoft, continues to delight old fans of the brand. Those who owned the Nokia phone in the late 90s and early 2000s. For many, their hearts were bleeding when they saw cult phones trying to shove into the Windows Mobile Procrustean bed. But now the old Nokia veterans, who developed all the classic models, are again at the helm, and they gradually bring them back to the market.

This year, four new low-cost Nokia smartphones with Android were introduced at the MWC: Nokia 1, Nokia 6, Nokia 7 Plus and Nokia 8 Sirocco. But most of all people were interested in another device - the Nokia 8110, the “matrix phone” (in common, the “banana”). He became especially popular after the Wachowski film, where Neo and his associates, thanks to the snap-out slider, looked as steep as possible.

The same nostalgia, on which last year model 3310 left, runs the same place. The Nokia 8810 is a sturdy device soaked in the nineties. With a battery, living for weeks, and priced below $ 100. The device works on KaiOS , and therefore, a couple of “advanced” functions (by the standards of the 90s) could be built into the old design with a hinged front cover. The phone has LTE, Google Maps, Google Assistant, Facebook and Twitter applications. And, of course, "Snake", where without it.

3. The first normal laptops for schoolchildren.

The focus of the MWC, of ​​course, always goes to smartphones. But this year I want to tell you about one line of laptops, presented by Lenovo. These are the first laptops for schoolchildren, which really can be issued in schools. Small Chromebooks withstand shocks spilled into table water, falling from a meter height. Hinges, keyboard, ports - reinforced. The display does not unscrew, the keys do not tear off.

The screen rotates 360 °, the laptop can be turned into a tablet and draw on it with your hand or a pencil. The older of the three models has a stylus that works without delay. That is, everything that the child wrote or painted appears instantly, and does not slide after the hand with a lag of 0.2-0.5 seconds. This function does not even have cool expensive models, and here - a budget school device.

The latest games on the new Chromebooks will not go; everything else is fine. The base model 100e Chromebook in the United States costs $ 219 (12 thousand rubles). For comparison, the old tablets with limited functionality, which “Rostec” as part of the experiment puts in Russian schools, cost about 20-30 thousand rubles.

The older model of the line, the 500e Chromebook with a “bezglovy” stylus, Lenovo is going to sell for $ 349 (ap .: already sells , and for $ 309).

4. Manufacturers believed in the power of AI

Another trend that migrated from 2017, and now goes to a new level. Smartphone developers have begun to compete in who can “pack” more AI into their device. Moreover, the term "artificial intelligence" is interpreted here quite widely.

The latest Qualcomm, Huawei, and Samsung chips are built with AI calculations and machine learning. Devices increasingly rely on themselves, not on the user. Smartphones begin to think independently and gradually learn, they do not need to constantly ship complex calculations to the clouds. For example, they are able to recognize which objects you are holding in the camera's sight, and quickly “adjust” the settings to make the photo more effective.

A good example - presented at the exhibition LG V30S. It almost does not differ from the old model V30, either externally or by characteristics. Because of this, some journalists call this smartphone the main failure of the entire exhibition. Others, on the contrary, write enthusiastic reviews about him, telling him that there is a future behind such a device (although they do not deny that a backport to the previous V30 can be made for all this). That's because Vision AI and Voice AI are in the smartphone.

The first is responsible for three camera functions: QLens, Bright Mode and AI Cam. QLens can recognize objects in the photo. With it, you can run a search for images - and Google will find you the same statue or the same mountain that your camera’s lens points to. No need to describe the "mountain in Switzerland in the canton of Valais ...". Just sfotkal - and the system found all similar objects. Likewise with food, clothes, celebrities, and so on.

Bright Mode can intelligently adjust the brightness in a photo taken in low light. Instead of a linear function, AI algorithms are used here, and LG convinces that they allow to increase the brightness of the image by two orders of magnitude and eliminate noise. Well, AI Cam analyzes items in the frame and recommends one of eight shooting modes ("portrait", "food", "pet", "city", "flower" and so on). This affects the selection of settings for the photo - saturation, viewing angle, color, lighting, reflections ... And all this in the camera of an ordinary small smartphone.

Voice AI at LG V30S is not so interesting, although the company is still proud of him. It allows you to enable applications and change settings with voice commands. The feature works in conjunction with Google Assistant and adds 32 exclusive to LG teams.

Meanwhile, Huawei successfully uses AI in a smartphone to control the car. The company introduced AI into its latest Kirin 970 processor. Smartphones built on it, like the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, are able to quickly recognize cats, dogs, food and other objects. And the RoadReader project presented the other day showed that the same camera can be used for autopilot. A car “sees” through a smartphone that a dog or person is in front of it and bypasses the obstacle (video here ). AI training in the smartphone for the project took only five weeks. At the MWC 2018 exhibition, Huawei brought Porche with a Mate 10 Pro smartphone behind the wheel. Maybe Google could save on autopilot creation, if it had installed such a smartphone on each car?

5. Fighting Android fragmentation

Each manufacturer of Android smartphones has its own shell, its own programs, its own firmware update cycles. Some people like customization, but now they mostly use it to advertise and promote their programs. In addition, as shown by the vulnerability of Meltdown and Specter, the abundance of different systems makes it difficult to install security patches. Now Google is trying to eliminate the fragmentation of its OS. For this program started Android One. This is a standard created by Google, which prohibits the installation of any add-ons over the original system.

The program was proposed for developing markets, but almost no one used it (there were several little-known smartphones in Turkey, India, Nigeria, Pakistan ...). Now, for the first time, three devices with Android One were presented to the MWC at once, and with the calculations for sale not in the Philippines, but in the USA and Europe. These are Nokia 6, Nokia 7 Plus and Nokia 8 Sirocco. If Google manages to convince other manufacturers to join the program, the security of smartphones will increase, and they will work faster. Plus - OS updates will be carried out instantly as soon as they are released by Google, and not with a delay of a couple of weeks or months. Translation of other manufacturers to the Android One standard is Google’s task for the coming year.

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By the way, today, on March 2, the pre-order of the Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphone shown right there on the MWC-2018 has opened . In the US, it costs $ 720 . Deliveries begin March 16th. In Russia, the price of the same model from Samsung is 60 thousand rubles , $ 1050. Rate what is called the difference.