Best and worst smartphone trends of 2018

The return of the quirky designs

Before the age of the touchscreens we had very different phones - swivels, sliders, clamshells, among others. The makers had the freedom to experiment with form factors and even when it didn't work, it brought along brand awareness and recognition.

But now that the smartphone industry has moved to all-touch devices - the touchscreens are a massive blocker to that creative freedom. The surprise this year is that despite the notch being on the rise, we saw the arrival of a few ingenious form factors for all-screen smartphones which offered an uncommon placement of the front-facing camera.

The first design had the selfie camera mounted on a pop-up platform. Vivo released the NEX S, which had a pop-up selfie camera on a motorized platform no bigger than a SIM slot. The motorized mechanism allowed it to pop out automatically whenever needed.

Then Oppo came up with another take on the motorized pop-up platform - but this time it was bigger and housed both the front and rear cameras. The entire top part of the Oppo Find X popped up and while this meant you would have to use it much more often than vivo's, the whole thing looked arguably cooler.

And finally, the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 and the Honor Magic 2 raised the bar. Those two makers also put the camera setups on sliders, but those require manual sliding up just like back in the old days. The slider mechanisms on the Mi Mix 3 and Magic 2 seem quite reliable and are very easy to operate - not to mention that the mechanical up-then-down fidgety action feels surprisingly satisfying with a dash of a retro vibe.

And while we are talking about slider and retro vibe, the Nokia 8110 4G really hit the bullseye this year. The rebirth of the notorious banana phone was long rumored, and when it happened, everyone was excited. While the new Nokia 8110 didn't impress much in the end, we were still thrilled to have a modern version of this handset and enjoyed sliding its cover up and down for no apparent reason.

The recently unveiled NEX Dual Display Edition took another approach to solving the challenge of having an all-screen front. Instead of worrying about fitting a secondary camera on the front - why not mount a secondary display at the back? A secondary display isn't a new concept - we can trace it back to the year 2002 or just look at the more recent phones like the Meizu Pro 7 and 7 Plus. With the NEX Dual Display, however, 'secondary' doesn't mean 'inferior' as the screen on the back is a high-res Super AMOLED unit, which allows operating the phone quite conveniently.

And before we are done with this quirky category, we'd like to mention the ROG Phone here but for an entirely different reason. The ROG phone by Asus is a powerful flagship smartphone whichever way you look at it, but what made it special is the entire suite of attachable docks and accessories. They expand its capabilities almost like an Iron Man suit and even though that means it's a quirky fella, it also makes it rather cool (with the right audience).