Best and worst smartphone trends of 2018

The multi-camera smartphones

Advancements in processing power has led a handful of camera innovations in 2018, but the most important one remains the introduction of multi-camera setups.

Just when everybody hopped on the dual-camera bandwagon, we witnessed the emergence of three- and four-camera smartphones.

Huawei kept improving its triple camera with the new Mate 20 series - the second-generation setup had a zoom camera, a wide-angle, and a super-wide-angle snapper. We also saw Honor doing its own take on the triple camera with the Magic 2 - it lacked a zoom camera, replaced by a depth sensor.

LG also launched a phone with a triple camera, too, the V40 ThinQ flagship - with a similar logic to Huawei Mate 20's setup. But LG was first to put an ultra-wide-angle camera on the G5 back in 2016, so nobody should be thinking of LG as playing catchup with Huawei. This year LG's traditional dual camera - wide + ultra-wide - evolved by adding a telephoto cam in the mix and this was quite expected actually.

Samsung launched a mid-ranger with a triple camera - the Galaxy A7. It's nothing impressive - a 24MP one, an 8MP ultra-wide, and a depth sensor, so the triple thing seemed more like a marketing trick. But it certainly makes a statement of the direction the industry will be going to.

But shortly after the Galaxy A7, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy A9 with a quadruple camera at the back - same as the A7, but with an additional 10MP telephoto snapper. That would be so easy to market, for sure, even if its camera performance is not stellar.

And while the Nokia 9 is still under wraps, all the rumors point to a six-camera setup at the back. Just wow!

Obviously, the camera trend is gaining momentum and we expect the triple and quadruple camera setups to become the new normal in the high-end.

Image-stacking during capturing is another camera advancement made available across many devices this year thanks to the overall jump in processing power. It seems to solve the inherently limited dynamic range of these small cameras, and it also helps get clearer and more colorful photos in low light. The Pixels were famous with this, but it's already available on many phones at different price ranges.

Digital well-being is now a thing

With the advancements in smartphones, we find more and more uses for them sometimes even replacing home computers to some users. With mobile applications and games designed in the most addictive way possible, it didn't take long until overuse of the always available computer screen in our pocket became an issue.

And while it's unrealistic to impose limits on smartphone use, in 2018 Google and Apple both started providing the tools to keep track of your smartphone use or in other words - your digital wellbeing.

Apple has Screen Time for iOS, which tracks your app usage and issues various warnings or can even restrict certain apps from launching if you have self-imposed limits. It can sync your screen time across all Apple devices and thus apply those restrictions in a more meaningful way.

Google has Digital Wellbeing, which does the same thing as Apple's, but the self-imposed restrictions you program it with can be way more aggressive. While Apple allows you to override the lockout of an app right away, Google isn't as liberal. If you want to continue using the app that ran out of screen time, you'd have to dig into settings and change the limit.

Those software restrictions put by the users won't do much if the users don't have the willpower to follow them, but they could be useful as parental controls for children.

AI is just another name for data-driven optimizations

And finally, while we are on the software side of things, let's talk AI.

Phone manufacturers made a big deal of AI being available on phones and in 2018 even midrange phones started to get dedicated hardware acceleration chips for AI tasks.

But even with hardware acceleration onboard, the marketing machine is a bit misleading regarding the scale and reach of the AI capabilities.

When they throw in AI, everybody imagines a thinking robot, and marketing is keen on selling this image.

But the reality is that the current AI implementation on phones is a data-driven software optimization, which allows the smart device to pick up patterns without having to be programmed specifically for them.

When we say patterns, we mean app usage patterns or phone wake patterns or even scene patterns - patterns in your photos so it can recognize the objects in them and patterns in the scenes you take pictures of so it can adjust colors and exposure.

Without meaning to downplay the entire progress made in this space over the past year, we just want to set the facts straight.

AI doesn't mean your smartphone has an intelligent robotic mind. It means that the computer system has been primed through the methods of machine learning to recognize patterns it has never seen before. It's able to recognize that you are pointing your phone to a pet even though it has never seen your particular pet before. It's able to recognize a particular human face across many photos in your Gallery app even though it has never seen this person before. It's able to shortlist all your pictures of bottles, or receipts or other identifiable objects with a simple search. But the AI functionality doesn't stretch much further than that.

We're sure we'll be hearing more of AI in 2019 but it would take a bigger leap in functionality to get us bitter tech reviewers excited.

At least that means we're nowhere near close to the machines taking over our world. Right? Right?