Your next phone could have a hole in it

Smartphone companies, along with their customers, became tired of the black slabs that have been our constant companions for the past many years. Last year finally saw some colour on the glass backs of phones with the result that there were some real beauties. Huawei first tried out beautiful gradients on their phones and have been continuing the trend. The company’s Mate 20 Pro came out in a ‘twilight’ gradient and a stunning emerald green hyper-optic variant.

Practically everyone else has now released phones with colours and gradients. The OnePlus 6T has a ‘Thunder Purple’ variant where the colour shifts from purple to black, simulating the colour of lightning streaking through the clouds. Samsung released a number of gradient-shaded phones in its A category mid-range devices including a refreshing ‘Lemonade Blue’, in which the colour shifts from a lemon green to a freshwater blue. It’s a good bet now that phone-makers will find it impossible to go back to black, white, silver and rose gold, offering no other colour options. Even though phones have to go into a case because of all that vulnerable glass, they like there to be colour on the inside, there to be seen when one wants.

Over the last year, Android phones have taken up the iPhone X’s famous notch and hard-sold it to customers as something desirable, even though on some devices it’s been so broad that it takes up most of the space a bezel would.

Roll over notch

This year, watch the notch being abandoned as companies adopt a new and interesting work-around to get a full-screen view — the punch hole. The front camera is now to be placed in a little cut-out in the screen leaving more room for the screen to go edge-less or nearly so.

Samsung has featured this punch hole on its Galaxy A8s launched in China and will be bringing the work-around called Infinity-O to their upcoming Galaxy S10 in February. Leaks indicate that the hole will also be used as a notification light. Samsung is practically the only manufacturer that held out against the notch while everyone else adopted it. But meanwhile, Huawei is bringing the punch hole to its Nova 4 smartphone and on a phone from sub-brand Honor. The punch hole may not be able to achieve the 3D mapping category of face unlock as has been featured on the iPhone X and Huawei Mate 20 Pro, so we’ll have to see what method can be used securely.

5G ready and not

Smartphones can’t but be 5G ready now that the broadband technology is in the offing and being as talked about as it is. In India, 5G will not happen at once and everywhere, so ordinary smartphone users won’t really see the benefits early in the game. 5G needs an abundance of transmitters and rather than add more, so many have been reduced, giving users poor signal strength even with existing connectivity. Until this issue sorts itself out, companies will probably at least use the 5G tag as a marketing line, letting potential customers know their devices are future-proof. 4G came late to India and is still not in everyone’s hands, so it’s over-optimistic to think 5G will be in place as readily as compatible phones will be available.

Folding it up

After many years of talking folding phones, they’re probably going to show up in 2019, though it’s unlikely they’ll be widely used as they’re going to be very experimental and very expensive. Samsung has repeatedly said it wants to be the first company to bring out a foldable phone though another company has showcased one of these. The idea of the folding phone will be to have a device that can be both phone and tablet and yet be portable. The methods used to keep the devices as light and thin as they can manage will lay the ground for more practical and usable folding phones in the future.

A crowd of cameras

Advances in smartphone camera tech have only raised expectations some more. We already saw phones with three cameras and Samsung came out with four cameras on its Galaxy A9 phone. This trend has just started to move beyond being just a gimmick and actually makes for interesting and creative photography such as with wide angle cameras. Companies are only going to push the envelope further with more camera tech. A 48 MP phone is to launch soon from Huawei. Several companies are looking at Time of Flight cameras to capture objects (or faces for face unlock) in 3D. The sheer number of camera lenses might also increase. LG apparently has a patent for putting 16 lenses on a phone.

Pop-up components may be used more on cameras since Vivo has shown how this can be done and Oppo brought out a phone with a swivelling camera a while ago.

Already, budget phones are coming with cameras that are so much better than they used to be and 2019 will see them improve even more. The use of AI to make photos look better will, of course, continue making photos perhaps less realistic but more desirable. In 2018, Google showed how software can be used to remarkably improve images and even see things in the dark not otherwise visible to the human eye. Other companies will also use some of these techniques as cameras become even more important on smartphones than they have been.

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