2017: The Smartphone Evolution

The Saga Of A Glorious Year For Smartphones

HO! beautiful people, Its December and as this great year of 2017 is ebbing, we at SuggestPhone can’t hold back from reflecting on this year of true innovation and glory for smartphones in multiple dimensions. So today, the purpose of this writing is to remember the goods 2017 has brought in the mobile technology world and also the potential bads that might manifest as we enter a phenomenal new year, 2018. 2017 has witnessed smartphones taking a more holistic approach towards moving ahead than any of the recent years. We saw some inspiring new stuff and a lot of strong foundations laid this year, on top of which 2018, will build up. So sit back, relax, get some hot cocoa ☕️ and let’s embark on this astonishing journey, our daily drivers have been on, all through 2017.

Design Language

When you look at a new smartphone, the first thing that strikes is the design and build quality. So let’s begin with this fundamental aspect of smartphones that saw a lot of advancements this year. It’s no news that the transition to a better unibody, metal enclosure, surfboard design has been in trend from late 2015. 2017 continued on to that bandwagon, we saw more and more smartphones adopting that design language where you have a premium looking metal enclosure usually rounded edges and typically what we call a surfboard design (Thank you, iPhone 6). The good news here is that even low key smartphones, starting at as low as INR 4,000 or $70 now are onto that design so not only the premium ones but also people buying these inexpensive devices or the ones getting their hands on their very first smartphone get a premium experience. Well, that’s also the problem with all the smartphones blindly following that design pattern, metal unibody enclosure with that gold finish, even the ones starting at a meagre Rs. 4,000 or the upper mid segment like Vivo V7 or Oppo or even Xiaomi and the ones at the top like iPhone 7. It all looks very monotonous and snatches away the premium and extravagant feel a flagship or an expensive smartphone should have. We are not against the cheaper ones getting a premium treatment but the ones paying a lot more should also get a lot more when it comes to design. We sincerely feel a dearth of this aspect. Although there are some shiners here like HTC with their new ‘Liquid Design’ with the U11 or the Pixel lineup with their minimalistic appeal, iPhone has taken the biggest leap forward but iPhone 8 still remains a relic, haunting from past at the same time boosting the confidence of other manufacturers like Xiaomi to hold onto that stale design story. Come on guys, bring something new to the table, its enough with the gold metal finish and awkward copies of rose golds which look more like tamarind and how can you forget the Moto’s strict allegiance to that curved grey design. We sincerely feel, its time for each and everyone on the smartphone manufacturing side to craft some new and innovating designs for their smartphones in 2018.

But that’s not all, you can’t really talk about design and not mention the year of going bezel-less. 2017 has been all about saying bye to those big bezels which apparently were not that big to us, but once you gaze at a bezel-less screen like the one on Samsung S8 or iPhone X or the homegrown Mi Mix 2, you’ll know what you’ve been missing for all these years. Smartphone design has made some super strides in 2017, with almost every flagship going bezel-less (No, Razer Phone does it differently and can we please not include Pixel 2 to the list). Different manufacturers have added their own flavour to the bezel-less 18:9 design philosophy, like Samsung, did it with curved edges and Apple went top notch 💁🏻‍♂️. And honestly, We appreciate each and every one of the significant leap they’ve taken with smartphone design in a long time. One that’s going to define design for the next few years. Not only the established giants like Samsung and Apple, some newbies took a chance at going bezel-less and they executed it nicely like the Essential Phone and Doogee Mix or Maze smartphone series. If you haven’t witnessed an 18:9 bezel-less magnanimity, we urge you to get your hands at one. Delight is guaranteed. The screen moulds perfectly with the body and the experience is more immersive than ever. A significant advantage is that besides having a giant screen, the footprint of the device remains the same, It’s just like eating a lot of pie and not getting any fat, how good is that?

Well, there was almost a new rule to get bezel-free in 2017. Some lads showed confidence in bezels and tried to pack them with more steroids, that could explain and justify their obstructive presence on your smartphone. Well, no other than the loved OnePlus 5 did it, but they didn’t do anything with the bezels hence the Oneplus 5T, toppling a flagship in just 5 months? That’s some serious desperation and we get that, but you also feel about the customers who just bought a flagship to know that it wasn’t a flagship anymore 😩. Google, coming as a surprise also launched the much-awaited Pixel 2 with those mammoth bezels, but to their justification, these giant bezels pack stereo speakers which as comes to disappointment are not so much stereo. On the other hand, Razer the god of gaming equipment marked its entry into the arena with Razer Phone, with a breathtaking 120Hz refresh rate display and rock-solid design and those giant bezels that pack stereo speakers and this time around unlike Pixel 2, these speakers on the Razer Phone are really great, as it turns out, these are the best speakers on a smartphone in 2017, closely followed by iPhone X.

Smartphone Displays

“What You See Is What You Get” is a famous statement in computer technology and this perfectly fits on the new age smartphones as well. The display is one of the most important aspect of the smartphone experience if not the most important. You don’t really see how a smartphone is performing or how good the camera is doing, what you see is the smartphone display and what It shows you is your view of your smartphone. So don’t ever compromise on the display quality. The smartphone world agrees with this statement truly as we saw some marvellous displays to awe-spire us in 2017. Whether it be the carnival colours on the giant, curved AMOLED displays on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Note 8 or it be the natural colours on the Pixel 2, forgot the best display ever rated? The iPhone X? 2017 has been really vibrant when it comes to display technology. The technology itself didn’t make any breakthroughs but the ramifications got a lot of love, hate and excitement. Again there are two distinct sects here, one the flagships which showed us the true colours of what a smartphone display could be, just absolutely jaw dropping colours, vibrancy, brightness and sunlight visibility. The Samsung Galaxy S8 and Note 8 burst out of the scene with new Infinity displays and man, they really nailed it. With curved, edge to edge, bezel-free, AMOLED displays, you can’t really pray for more of a display. Samsung got close to perfection on this one but one thing we didn’t like and what many of us don’t is the festive colours of Samsung displays. They are over saturated beyond the point that it hurts. If you are into over saturated displays, this is the best you can expect of a smartphone display as of 2017. Whereas Google took the opposite approach by backing more natural and somewhat muted colours on the Pixel 2 which also got a lot of controversy due to these “dull” colours alongside a host of other issues with Pixel 2 XL’s POLED display issues. (That was very bad for a flagship from a company called Google). In my personal opinion, I liked Pixel 2’s display and it was good enough. Though, later this year Google heard the masses and gave a software update which gave the users option to go full carnival mode like Samsung displays (Google over did the saturation and it broke Samsung’s saturation levels with that mode. A strong reply for the “dull colours” complaints by Google). On the other hand, iPhone X really got the best of all, with a new OLED display, manufactured by Samsung with no carnival colours and just the right colour balance. Great brightness levels and no complaints as with Pixel 2 XL. It was rated as the best smartphone display ever, Cheers! Apple. Let’s see how far Apple can take the display race with crown at its helm. And it will be really worth watching to see how Google learns from its grave mistakes with Pixel 2 this year to make Pixel 3, a blockbuster in 2018.

The second sect, the middle segment and budget segment smartphones also got some display improvements with most of the devices now featuring a 5-inch display at least with a respectable average pixel density of 290–320. For budget smartphones, this is really good news. Of course, there are some outliers like the Vivo V7 having a giant display but a poor pixel density of 280, at a big screen, a poor resolution like that just makes the experience low class and annoying at times. Others like Xiaomi and Moto have been faring well with their smartphone displays being at least 720p on smaller screens and up to 1080p on smartphones going above Rs. 12,000. The saturation levels are a mixed bag in these displays but the colour reproduction is good enough and justifiable at the price point. It is good to see high resolution and bigger displays making their way into the budget segment, so a wider range of audience can really cherish the smartphone experience.

By the end of the year, we’ve seen some advancements in Micro LED technology that might make into smartphone displays by the end of 2018 or early 2019. MicroLEDs have the capability of replacing the colour deficiency and power hunger of regular IPS LCD Panels maintaining the brightness and contrast of an OLED without severe issues such as burn-ins. Micro LEDs is really something to look forward to as they can turn OLED displays out of the picture. Smartphones are in need of display advancements that can achieve levels of OLED without all the issues that come bundled with OLED panels such as burn-ins and colour shifts.

Also, this is not future talk but Samsung and Apple have got patents for foldable display smartphones and you might be seeing one from Samsung first as early as 2019. Apple as always will take time to perfect the technology and might jump into foldable iPhones by 2020. How cool is that?

Compute Power

Continuing the trend, the compute power on the smartphones really came around Moore’s Law. With the power of smartphones excelling even some of the laptops launched in 2017. (Yeah, Bionic boy, we’re just talking about you).

Smartphones as ever got more powerful with raw computation power nearly doubling as to the previous year and with these large uncompromising RAMs, smartphones were more powerful than ever. Some of the flagships packed more power than some recent laptops, we’ve been saying this for a long time that smartphones will go above laptops, but 2017 just showed us that.

Qualcomm unleashed its flagship platform for the year 2017 in December 2016, known as Snapdragon 835. With new Kryo cores, Snapdragon 835 left everything in dust. Not only raw computing power, the new Snapdragon 835 got some biggies in other departments such as DSP (Digital Signal Processor), ISP(Image Signal Processor) and charging (QuickCharge)as well. It improved what smartphone cameras could do from the ground up and paved the way for gigabit speeds. That’s not all, Qualcomm didn’t let it focus falter from non-flagship devices which sell a lot more and reach a greater audience with new Snapdragon 625 and 653 platforms. These packed some serious flagship grade features in budget range devices and gave a more refined experience to the wider spectrum of audience. Some advancements were also made with Snapdragon 435 in the lower budget segment, which gave, even more, people to join the Snapdragon revolution and quality performance with some really inexpensive devices, starting as low as Rs. 4,999 or $80. For the smartphone community, this is a really good sign as more capable hardware is reaching to more people, making them eligible to newer experiences and possibilities of what the devices in their pockets could do for them. This has a broad significance which can’t be simply described. Developers get more audience as more people now have devices to run their apps, this can do wonders.

We am still flummoxed with the amount of RAM, smartphone manufacturers are packing these days into their devices. 2017 saw some staggering numbers in this department with major smartphones packing as much as 8GB of RAM, really guys? 3GB RAM has become a standard with only the iPhones as flagships carrying less than 4GB of RAM. (Nice work, Apple) Yeah, more RAM is definitely good but is that the way? I feel that we are showing less faith in software by making such humongous amount of Memory in our daily drivers. My compass still directs me to the point that 4GB of RAM should be enough and if your device needs more to perform at its best, you are not doing good software buddy! That’s my major beef with smartphones like Oneplus 5 which vehemently undermine the potential of good software and software engineering by stuffing smartphones with more and more RAM. It’s not about who’s giving more RAM anymore, as it is about who’s making the best software to get the most out of commodity hardware.

This discussion about computer power of smartphones can’t complete without the star of the year SoC by Apple that shattered every record out there and even threw the legendary Snapdragon 835 out of the ground. Apple launched a behemoth of SoC with A11 Bionic. This guy is really what Apple says it to be “Superhuman Intelligence” as it nearly doubles down on all the Snapdragon 835 benchmarks. Apple has been doing some serious chip work since they launched their custom 64-bit CPU with A7 in the iPhone 5S. The tradition of overthrowing everything the Android world has to offer in terms of SoC has been continuing since then and the fire got some high flames this year with Bionic being the most powerful SoC of the year, powering iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X. As in the RAM department, Apple is still making iPhones go with almost 3GB of RAM and as I said earlier, If this is Apple’s faith on the goodness of iOS and a pursuit of making iOS do well in limited resources, Its really worth appreciation.

Smartphone GPUs have become a major component to be discussed, as unlike a few years back when all that GPUs meant were gaming. Newer possibilities are rising that require top-notch GPUs, whether it be Machine Learning, Augmented Reality or what not. Gaming has always been a pillar of a smartphone experience and 2017 didn’t disappoint with flagships shipping with Adreno 540 powering all the games you can possibly imagine with blazing guns. Qualcomm’s dominance in the chip market was reinstated this year with Qualcomm’s products and chips powering nearly everything. Huawei comes next with its Kirin series and Samsung doesn’t seem much convinced with its efforts on Exynos. Apple, on the other hand, is doing an exceptional work with its chips. The horizon appears to remain the same in 2018, with Qualcomm’s grip increasing on the market with Snapdragon 845 launched recently, which aims at powering more than just smartphones.

Almost all of the 2017 flagships have near or same hardware specifications with Snapdragon 835 running em all. This seems to be a tradition going into 2018 as Google mentioned in the Pixel 2 announcement, that more and more smartphones are gonna have the same hardware specs, what’s gonna differentiate them is software and AI. We too, share the view that the race to future lies in AI. Pumping hardware is not gonna take the smartphones to glory they expect.

Smartphone Photography & Videography

Smartphones saw some breakthroughs in camera and video performance as well in 2017. Smartphone photography is now a real “thing” with smartphones going all guns blazing towards DSLRs. Though, DSLRs and professional cameras will always have an edge in terms of lens size and build compared to portable smartphone cameras but software again is the king here, with some recent computational photo processing tricks and state of the art Machine Learning getting smartphone cameras close to DSLRs.

We know the dual-camera hype got its fuel from Apple joining the dual-camera bandwagon back in 2016 with iPhone 7 Plus and the feature everybody knows about called “Portrait Mode” or “Bokeh Effect”. When Apple does something it goes wild and everyone else just rushes to catch up, the same happened here in 2017 with almost every flagship boasting a dual camera organisation (Uh,Huh, Ahem, Pixel 2!) whether it be Apple itself or others. Sony, Samsung, Motorola, Huawei, and even Xiaomi are following the dual camera ideology as a word of God. Having dual camera is not all market hype, it really gets smartphone photography to new levels but given you get it well enough. Many smartphones just have dual camera setups, even worse than that a good single sensor can do. Razer Phone is a good example of that. And Pixel 2 stands as the epitome of smartphone photography for 2016 and 2017 as well. Cheers to that. Smartphone cameras have really progressed a lot in 2017 with lower Megapixel numbers doing higher on performance numbers. The dynamic range, exposure, white balance and natural colours, the photos this year look significantly better and you’ll love them. Pixel 2 tops the chart for smartphone and damn, this camera is a masterpiece by Google. Google loads this camera with all the software and Machine Learning wizardry has learned over the year with Google Images. LowLight photography is brighter than ever(No Pun Intended). With iPhone X the close second in smartphone cameras. Others like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Note 8 also do great under whatever conditions you can shoot.

When It comes to videography, again we see some leaps in quality as well as performance with OIS and EIS getting a lot better this year. The new iPhones excel in smartphone videography with new frame rate options and better performance with handling high-quality videos. (Thanks to Bionic Booster) I feel Pixel 2 comes a close second in the video department followed by the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Note 8.

In general commodity smartphones, especially in India, the megapixel numbers are still at the boom and deplorable camera quality is still on high. Most budget smartphones (<10K) don’t have a decent camera. As you go close to 15K and above, you start getting those advanced dual camera setups and considerably respectable camera quality. In budget segment, the camera is not really the focus, We get it but that doesn’t justify absolutely any development in the camera quality over time. People should get out of the Megapixel delusion and Smartphone manufacturers should really make some efforts towards developing better cameras rather than big megapixel numerics and selfie beauty filters. So make it a resolution for 2018! And the fellow people of the great nation, please look out for better cameras rather than better megapixel numbers and selfie filters. Do look out for Aperture details and sensor dynamics before considering a smartphone in the camera department, or you can easily visit SuggestPhone.com to know the best about smartphone photography.

Mobile Operating Systems

The hardware you hold in your hand is as important as the software that it runs on. Mobile Operating systems are a long way from the crappy, unpolished and pixelated softwares they used to be. Both Android and iOS are very mature and polished in 2017. Android and iOS have been making some solid strides in provding a more comprehensive experience to the user. Android got its latest release 8.0 Oreo in May, this year and iOS is at its best with iOS 11 released at WWDC 2017. Both the operating systems are more fluid and responsive with increased performance and lower memory footprint.

The hardware you hold in your hand is as important as the software that it runs on. Mobile Operating systems are a long way from the crappy, unpolished and pixelated software they used to be. Both Android and iOS are very mature and polished in 2017. Android and iOS have been making some solid strides in providing a more comprehensive experience to the user. Android got its latest release 8.0 Oreo in May, this year and iOS is at its best with iOS 11 released at WWDC 2017. Both the operating systems are more fluid and responsive with increased performance and lower memory footprint.

This year has not been the best for Apple’s software with iOS 11 not realising its fullest potential, all credit to the tons of bugs and as we call it efficiency-deficiency seen. The battery performance degraded with lots of quirky bugs appearing one after another, iOS 11 appeared like a pre-release Beta not a complete software and coming from a company like Apple, this is really disgraceful. But in all, iOS 11 is the biggest leap for iPad and has some special features built right keeping iPad in mind. The simplistic yet polished UI gets even better with little tweaks here and there. The changes go deep into the surface with an all new file system, a more secure encryption and a tons of improvements in the system. iOS 11 feels refreshed yet familiar and despite the bad time, the users still adore it with adoption rate of 60% at the time of this writing.

Android Oreo (8.0) brings Android to a whole new level of fluidity and performance. With systemwide improvements and fixes and a few new features here and there. Notifications on Android has always been a better view and gets better with Oreo. Android borrows the iOS’ notification badges called notification dots. The much-loved picture in picture has arrived to handsets and the UI follows are more adaptive approach instead of just scaling it according to a device. Android Oreo brings a lot of performance improvements under the hood with new Java 8 runtime APIs, webview enhancements and better support for keyboard-based navigation and lots more. The major problem with Android and Its a pain, remains distribution. Android 8.0 despite being out in the open in only on 0.5% and Nougat from the previous year is still up on 18%.

As these two mammoths in the mobile operating system world move on ahead, we see a unique rivalry based on collaboration rather than difference. Android has been borrowing some of the iOS features lately and iOS has been borrowing some from Android. As the two operating systems mature and continue to build up moving forward in 2018, the fight between Android and iOS is very old yet very ripe with each release.

Security And Other Miscellaneous Features

Authentication

Fingerprint sensor was the gold standard for smartphone security and payment authentication and entering 2017, after two years of development and advancements, fingerprint sensor was the ultimate personal and secure mechanism for ensuring security with scan times going as low as 0.3 seconds. Various incremental technologies like ultraviolet scans, improved the accuracy of fingerprint sensor even when your hands were dirty or wet. This tech didn’t reach much of the smartphones as of today but it is sure to come in future. A plethora of flagships be it Pixel 2, LG V30, Samsung Galaxy S8 et cetera et cetera relied on this secure and convenient mechanism for authentication since 2014, when Apple popularised it with iPhone 5S.

Samsung went a little sideways and tried something new called ‘Iris Scan’ which is based on the front camera scanning your eye (Iris) to unlock the phone and make payments on Samsung Pay. This was the first attempt towards what we call ‘Facial Recognition’ and Samsung included it this year too with Galaxy S8 and Note 8. Whereas Samsung’s attempt must be appreciated, It was not truly facial recognition and a good security measure as it only matched the photo of the user’s Iris with the recorded one, so even a photo could fool it and open your device. That’s bad!

Apple broke the scene for authentication again with reports that the TouchID maker was working towards implementing the fingerprint sensor within screen, but the tech was not very accurate as of 2017, thus Apple decided to overthrow TouchID with FaceID, FaceID is Apple’s facial recognition system that is based on depth sensing and Machine learning using some really cool state of the art sensors built into that infamous notch at the top of the iPhone X. In the beginning, everyone thought, abandoning TouchID was a big mistake and FaceID will be a failure. But as it comes, Apple doesn’t half-cook things, FaceID worked absolutely flawless, except the fact that it is visibly slower than TouchID, FaceID is more convenient for some but less for others, you have to look at your smartphone with open eyes to unlock it, that stops those overlooked casual peeping on your smartphone during meetings or class. Apple has strong confidence in the capability of FaceID and the possibilities that can be explored with the TrueDepth system in the notch. As for the security and speed, In the beginning, TouchID too was slow and buggy but later with software updates, it became the gold standard we love. We are certainly sure that FaceID will get a lot better and good at many things with software updates, give it some time people, meh. TouchID, We miss you! 😞

Then came the Oneplus 5T and it gave the users the convenience of Face Unlock and the security of fingerprint scanner. Man! that face unlock is searingly fast but uses a simple front camera to match the face with an already recorded image so it’s not that secure, that’s why Oneplus allowed to 5T to have the fingerprint sensor as well, to ensure that the duo works best for everyone. Good Job, Oneplus! 😎

Active Edge

Google bought the HTC engineering division and that led to the presence of Active Edge found on HTC U11 from May 2017 on Google Pixel 2. What Active Edge is, a hardware feature which enables the HTC U11, Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL to perform some functionality when you squeeze the smartphone, when holding in hand (from edges). Right now, it enables Pixel 2 to activate Assistant by just firmly squeezing the device. How much you wanna squeeze your smartphone can be configured with the settings app. What’s bad is that, Google doesn’t allow you to reconfigure it to allow some other action. On the other hand, HTC U11 also showcases the feature and allows the user to configure it according to wish, It may sound like an odd gimmick but once you are into it, It kinda grows. Its super fun to just squeeze your phone to compose a tweet or change the song or what not. The way Pixel 2 focuses this feature only for Google Assistant is a gross under utilisation and looks like a straight reply to Samsung’s separate button for Bixby.

Voice Based Personal Assistants: Google Assistant, Siri And Bixby

Intelligent personal assistant, right on your smartphone is not a new feature but the use is readily increasing as these so-called “Intelligent” assistants are getting way smarter than just a speech recognition software in the very beginning. Google Assistant as always is way ahead of Siri, with almost everything except liveliness. Google Assistant is no more exclusive to Android as announced at Google I/O 2017. It debuted on iOS with its fair share of limitations. Google Assistant is the ramification of Google’s Machine Learning and AI prowess, It has developed over years with tons of data available. Siri on the other hand, is not so sophisticated and can eat dust any day before the Assistant. Assistant has better language and speech recognition, way better understanding of context and can do a lot more than what Siri just refuses by saying “It’s beyond my abilities” If Apple wants Siri to be something, It must be improved and provided full access of iOS at least. We get Apple’s limitation as it is very strict with privacy and doesn’t have any data to train Siri as Google does, but hey the world is not fair and If Siri needs to live up to Its expectations, Apple’s got to put Siri on steroids soon, until its too late and Assistant captures the iOS user base as well.

Samsung also got into the mix with Bixby, their own intelligent personal assistant with a dedicated button on Samsung Galaxy S8 and Note 8. Bixby opposite to its contemporaries has full system control of Galaxy devices and can do nearly everything concerned with system tasks. It has got good context awareness and integrates nicely with the display as well as the camera. It is not very polished yet and can’t do much outside the smartphone system tasks but It seems very promising.

As of 2017, Assistant triumphs all and is the King of personal assistants while Siri due to experience stands second while Bixby the new entry does spectacularly well but still has a big room for improvement and needs polishing.

Augmented Reality: ARKit and ARCore

Apple pushed the race for Augmented Reality with the announcement for ARKit with iOS 11, overnight making iOS the biggest AR platform. With devices from iPhone 6S and later supporting all the AR features, ARKit brings with iOS 11. Apple was always vocal about Augmented Reality and ARKit was just the way it could be done. ARKit enables developers to develop rich AR based apps for iOS. The possibilities here with AR defy description. It can enrich existing apps and create new ones with users just loving the refined experience that is unique to iOS. Think about gaming, medical, informative, news, sports and all the ways AR can revolutionise apps and smartphone experience. ARKit falls no short of its expectations, though still in its early stages ARKit has got some great apps on the App store and the momentum is immense.

Augmented Reality (AR) is the new world where Google is starting a fight with Apple, who already established iOS as the world’s biggest AR platform with the release of iOS 11, and in a few nights via updates, everyone on the Apple ship got a brand new world to play with. Developers included. Google despite its longing efforts on the ‘Tango’ Project for AR didn’t catch any attention. Looking at the things, one could assume that Apple would do AR with some additional hardware and Google being the software powerhouse will do it on existing hardware with some magical software update, well that school of thinking turned upside down with the release of ARKit by Apple.

Google accepted its defeat quite early and left the ‘Tango’ project in a hurry to do something with software like Apple, which gave birth to ARCore. Google’s answer to ARKit, as always with Android, ARCore is still available on a very few selected phones including Pixel 2 XL. If you wanna catch some cool Augmented Reality work, you are more likely to be happy with Apple’s Platform. As the developers are more active and you’ll find more content on the App Store due to the fact that AR is available on a major portion of iOS devices compared to a few Pixel 2s and Galaxy S8s out there.

Something Else and More…

2017 had a lot to talk about. It surprised us at each and every step with new innovations and delighted us with new applications. Due to time and space complexity as the core principles of computers, we won’t be able to cover everything here. But we would like to mention a few other things, which delighted people in 2017 and hopefully will continue to do so in 2018.

Animoji

Really? you thought we won’t discuss the most important innovation of 2017 (😅😅) Animoji is Apple’s way of saying yeah, you have the iPhone X. Animoji got a lot of attention and delighted people all across the globe. Animoji are Apple’s animated emojis, a bunch of emojis which copy your facial expressions and repeat what you say to make a 10-second long video that can be shared with others. It sounds way too simpler and boring but believe me, you haven’t seen it. Animoji are really cool, (because I am saying) and on a serious note, got a lot of attention, love and delighted users. Didn’t you see the Animoji Karaoke all over the social media?

Now Playing

Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL featured a new Shazam like always listening feature, which happens to work whenever your Pixel 2 is on sleep and there’s some music playing around. The device will display the details of song on the lockscreen, from where you can tap to know more about the song and listen it or buy it. How’s that?

No headphone Jack 🚫

We know, this is some bad news but headphone jack ain’t coming back. last year, it was only Apple but this time around as it happens, Google the one making a mockery out of Apple’s decision to remove the jack, removed it from Pixel 2 itself. Most of the other flagships are in spree to get rid of the jack, many of them already have and others will follow in 2018. The message is quite clear, wireless in the true future for digital audio.

USB C and Fast Charging

While 2017 was also the year for many of the smartphone manufacturers to make the move to USB C type connectors and charging. Again it’s a mixed bag where some of the players are still stuck with older technology and others have moved on leading to chaos, called the ‘Dongle Jungle’. Fast charging has moved from a feature to a necessity on most smartphones but many of the budget and mid-segment players are not interested in the prospect of fast charging in low budget phones. iPhones made the move for wireless charging as well as fast charging with a fast charger to be purchased separately, really Apple? That’s annoying at best. Oneplus rocks the fast charging arena with dash charging providing 59% of charge in just 30 minutes of charge.

New Emojis and The story of Google’s Mistake With Burger🍔 Emoji 🍔

Yeah, you can’t really move to a conclusion without highlighting the error of second biggest tech company on the planet in making a burger emoji. Though, this was taken very seriously by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Android 8.1 fixes the issue with a reworked burger and beer emoji, happy? emoji-nation.🤓

Talking of Emoji, the Unicode consortium has approved a few new emoji including the redhead and others.

2017: Rewind

So that was a brief note on how 2017 witnessed the smartphone world. It gives us a glorious glimpse into how great 2018 is going to be. Aren’t you excited? because we at SuggestPhone are with the promises 2018 is going to unfold. Smartphone has grown into a lot more than just a handheld device, they are our “Daily Drivers” as people call them. Ultimately, It’s not a complete description of 2017 and there’s a lot we missed. So, what according to happened nice in the smartphone world, what do you appreciate about 2017 most? Do tell us in the comments. We appreciate your taking time to read this story. We are grateful to you and we are grateful to technology for helping us along the way to get homo sapiens -”Man the wise” where we are. 🙌🏻

SuggestPhone has been hard at work all around 2017, we’ve deeply covered the happenings in smartphones in India and also explained some confusing topics whether it be Snapdragons or Power Banks or Processors and a lot more. If you have reached this point, we know you love us. Come on, support us by visiting SuggestPhone.com and follow us for some amazing technical content on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 😍 If you like our Medium debut story with this one, don’t forget to give us some few hundred of claps. 😃

2017 has been stupendous for smartphones and technology in general. Its the age of bleeding tech and in this fast-paced world, we sometimes take technology for granted, this is the time to reflect on how much it has improved and helped us for good. For perspective, 64KB of Memory took humans to the Moon with early Apollo missions. Today, 40 years later we have these tiny devices in our pockets with millions of times more memory and compute power, let’s take a moment to appreciate how far we’ve come, then only can we figure out where we are going. Technology has revolutionised our life, but its humans who control technology, not the other way around. Let’s make something wonderful and appreciate the plenty we have, love others and make peace!

A Very Happy Christmas and New Year from SuggestPhone In Advance. Let there be light!

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