Smartphones are an important part to everyone’s life in 2016 as materialistic as that sounds. But, could you honestly live without it for a week or even a month? Regardless of this, pretty much every tech company has released their phone for 2016 to prepare for the holiday season and the huge rush of sales that Christmas brings – for a lot of companies, this is when the vast majority of their revenue is produced for the whole entire year. However, it’s November which means there is under two months until 2017 starts. For this reason, here are some expectations that smartphones should have in 2017 to get consumers a little excited about.

 

 

#1 Artificial Intelligence

Google has been the first company to properly stick artificial intelligence onto the phone, with the Google Pixel and Pixel XL, in the form of Google Assistant. What Google Assistant does is enable you to find out more information than Google Now and, to some extent, converse with the assistant. The assistant remembers the content of the conversation prior to a question which makes answering them more fluid and relevant to what the user asked.

As it stands, Google Assistant is only on the Pixel phones. Saying this, as more phones get the newest version of Android, I am sure we will start seeing other phones have the Google Assistant on board too.

What will be interesting is how Apple tackles AI with Siri and how it will compare with Google because, at the moment, Google is 1 up on Apple in terms of AI.

 

 

#2 OLED Screens Become the Norm

A lot of phone manufacturers are still using LCD screens in their smartphones simply because they are cheaper. For the majority of mid-range to cheap smartphones, this will stay the same for 2017. However, for high end flagship phones, you should expect to see more companies placing OLED screens in their phones to make the displays more vibrant, brighter and blacker – Samsung already do this with their phones and you should expect to see Apple to do the same.

 

 

#3 Larger Storage Capacities

By this, I refer to the minimum or lowest storage capacity that are offered by phones. A few years ago, this was 16GB. In 2016, this increased to 32GB. For 2017, you should not be surprised to see a lot of companies move to 64GB: especially with the fact that SSD storage is becoming increasingly cheaper year on year.

 

 

#4 Larger Batteries

For the last 2-3 years, there has been a constant cry from consumers to remove the camera lip produced on some phones and increase the thickness of the phone to accommodate a larger batter. This is because, at the end of the day, a phone can’t be used without power! As well as this, people don’t want to be turning things off such as location, Wifi, Bluetooth and more and limit the use of their brand new phone out of fear it will die on them.

Therefore, you should expect to see the majority of battery sizes increase to accommodate this consumer demand, potentially by as much as 300-500mAh. If they do not, the cries will unfortunately continue!