Yeah, it’s only March, but phone season has begun for 2018. Dozens of new handsets were unveiled at Mobile World Congress, the largest smartphone show on Earth, (here are the highlights[1]) and Samsung’s Galaxy S9[2] is already on its way to early birds. Also, Google is now circulating a developer preview of the next Android version, currently codenamed Android P[3].
With all this action, we’re beginning to get a picture of what smartphones in 2018 will look like. Here are some of the more interesting trends you may see on your next phone.
Notches Galore
It’s been years since smartphones didn’t all look mostly the same. In 2018, we can expect mobile manufacturers to once again get on the same wavelength—with that wave coming straight from Cupertino. Apple put a controversial notch at the top of its iPhone X screen[4] and we’ve already seen Android phones start to adopt it.
Asus has already shown off a line of phones[5] with Apple’s new signature notch chopped out of the top, and the LG G7 and others[6] will likely follow it into Notch City. With Google offering support for "display cutouts" in its early Android P developer preview[7], it looks like the notch invasion is just beginning. The Essential Phone[8] already had a camera cutout in 2017.
By year end, the phone market will be full of phones with really long, edge-to-edge screens, and a notch cut right out from the top. Many iPhone X users don’t seem to really like the notch, but don’t expect that to stop anyone. When the iPhone makes a design change, the industry tends...