Top news of 2018: Q1

As the year 2018 draws to a close we are hoping 2019 will be an interesting one. We are also taking the chance to remind ourselves what the past twelve months brought. We'll go about it chronologically, starting with the most interesting stories from the first quarter of 2018.

The first three months of the year set the tone for what’s to come. There’s CES in early January, the MWC in late February and a variety of one-off events in between. Here are the 30 most-read news article we published between January and March.

The Galaxy S9 duo launched at a Samsung Unpacked event, but not before a torrent of rumors came out of the rumor mill. One leak proved fairly accurate in revealing the S9/S9+ memory configurations. The leak also predicted that there will be no 512GB model, Samsung left that for the Note9. The first photos we saw showed few design changes from the S8 and it looked like the screen to body ratio would remain essentially the same.

Notches were a major concern this year and people groaned at the sight of early Huawei P20 renders. Those got the notch right, but not the fact that the company kept the fingerprint reader on the bezel below the screen for both the P20 and P20 Pro (which this leaks called “Plus”).

We handled the vivo APEX at the MWC and were wowed by its in-display fingerprint reader and pop-up camera – vivo’s answer to the notch problem. But that was merely a prototype, we didn’t expect the vivo NEX S to launch just months later.

Speaking of notches, we rounded up all notched phones at the MWC for a photo shoot. Looking back at our sarcastic tone it’s clear we were still getting used to the taste of the notch. We wonder how we would have reacted if we had seen the Pixel 3 XL in February.

A mostly-accurate OnePlus 6 spec sheet sparked a lot of interest. At that point we already knew about the notch.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro made a big splash by selling 300,000 units in under 3 minutes, just two weeks after the phone launched. The interest in an extensive spec leak the day before launch already hinted this phone will be a hit.

It’s easy to forget how young New Nokia is – it was only in February when we were looking at images of the Nokia 7 plus. This would the HMD’s first 18:9 phone and it would prove to be one of its most popular models (and it already has a successor, the Nokia 8.1).

There were Nokia 8 Pro schematics that hinted at a five-cam setup. This device was rumored as “Nokia 10” first, then “8 Pro” and most recently “Nokia 9”. But rumors is all we got – the year is over and HMD’s flagship is still nowhere to be seen (the 8.1 is really more of a “7.1 plus”).

Here’s the list of the Top 30 news article from Q1 this year (in chronological order).