Although CES 2018 is well under way in Las Vegas, a lot of the main smartphone manufacturers, such as Apple, Samsung, LG, Huawei, Sony, OnePlus and more release their flagship smartphones at later times throughout the year, usually apart from one another to increase the publicity of the launch. 2017 turned out to be the year of bezel-less smartphones. What will 2018 turn out to be the year for, with regards to smartphones and their technology? Here are four elements (or predictions) that you should be looking for if you are interested in purchasing a smartphone in 2018.

 

 

#1 Embedded Fingerprint Sensor in Screen

The main feature that should be with smartphones in 2018 is the implementation of a fingerprint sensor under the touchscreen of the smartphone. The likes of Samsung and Apple were trying to implement this last year. However, for Samsung, it turned out the technology was not ready. For Apple, they decided to opt for facial recognition rather than the embedded fingerprint sensor, as the iPhone X made clear.

The technology has had time to progress and already we have seen the first smartphone to have a fingerprint under the display. At CES 2018, it was one of Vivo’s prototype smartphone that had the first fingerprint under the display. Therefore, if Vivo can and have done it effectively, we can expect many other companies to do the same.

 

 

#2 The Rise in OLED Displays

Although there are a lot of smartphones that have OLED (or AMO-LED such as Samsung), there are still many smartphones out there that still adopt traditional LCD screens with back-lights. The problem with LCD screens is that the screens are not as efficient as OLED, although cheaper, and do not have the ability, like OLED, to individually turn off pixels to produce the blackest of blacks.

OLEDs are, by far, the choice of screen for manufacturers. On top of this, Vivo’s fingerprint sensor under the screen can only work with OLED, since the backlight of LCD screens means it won’t work with LCD screens. Therefore, 2018 smartphones should have OLED screens.

 

 

#3 64GB/8GB by Default

One of the only smartphones of last year that offered 8GB of RAM was in fact the OnePlus 5 and 5T. Although some people thought this was a bit ‘overkill’, it future proofs the smartphone for software upgrades and more resourceful applications.

Most of the smartphones of 2017 had 4GB. However, we can expect this to increase, alongside the amount of storage available, to 64GB and 8GB of RAM, or, at the minimum, 6GB.

 

 

#4 A Split Between Single/Dual Rear Cameras

The main attraction of having dual rear cameras is to enable portrait mode, which allows for the background to be blurred to produce more professional looking pictures. The problem with this, though, is that Google has a camera that can do this through machine learning and artificial intelligence, as the Pixel 2 and 2 XL made evident. Therefore, if a single camera can do just as good a job of portrait mode as dual cameras, and can zoom to a good effect too, what’s the need for dual cameras?

This year could see a serious split between manufacturers implementing single and dual cameras, depending on cost and how they want to do portrait mode on their cameras.