The best and worst of Mobile World Congress 2018
Mobile World Congress 2018: what happened? Maybe it’s best to start with what didn’t
happen: Huawei didn’t have a new flagship phone, LG rebadged its old
flagship phone, and Motorola and HTC had no phones to show at all. The
traditional deluge of new super-specced phones just wasn’t here as it
usually is.
But that didn’t leave us with a boring show — far from
it. Nokia reached back into the archives to revive another classic,
Google’s hardware partners presented their first Android Go devices, and
the pervasive buzzwords of 5G and AI were everywhere. There were even some cool laptops to look at. Here are the highlights, followed by the unfortunate lowlights.
The best
The demise of screen bezels
Whether companies call them full-screen, all-screen,
FullVision, or Infinity Displays, there’s no mistaking the fact that a
modern phone in 2018 is most readily recognized by the scarcity of its
bezels around the screen. This is an awesome thing, allowing companies
like Asus to give us 6.2-inch flagship phones within a smaller physical
footprint than their previous 5.5-inch devices. Such has been the
transformation between last year’s Zenfone 4 and this year’s Zenfone 5.
As to the wider mobile industry, we’ve gone from Samsung and LG being
the exception with their vanishingly thin bezels in 2017 to now being
the norm.
Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus
You may have been disappointed by the incremental nature
of Samsung’s upgrades this year, but it’s hard to argue that there was
any better phone at MWC than Samsung’s new flagship duo. With a new
dual-aperture camera, a fingerprint reader now sanely position in the
middle of the back, and the best and latest processors, the Galaxy S9 is
a formidable giant that will tower over the Android phone industry for
at least the rest of this year. Its similarities to the existing Galaxy
S8 are a strength rather than a hindrance: that phone was one of the
best-designed handsets last year and remains a class-leading device
today.
Nokia’s 8110 Matrix phone
Yes, we are all suckers for gadgets that stir up feelings
of nostalgia for our lost (or dwindling) youth. HMD Global, the company
exploiting the Nokia brand, has shown itself an expert in refining and
updating classic models from the Nokia archive for the modern world.
Pricing the 8110 at less than $100, the company gives you a surprising
amount of advanced functionality to go with the familiar slider styling.
This phone has LTE, Google Assistant and Google Maps, Twitter and
Facebook apps, Snake (because it has to), and a promised standby time of 25 days.
Lenovo’s awesome little Chromebooks
Not traditional fare for a phone show, but Lenovo’s
Chromebooks for schools left a positive impression here at MWC. Each of
them has been ruggedized to withstand drops and spills, and the
note-taking capabilities of the two higher-end models are great. One
allows you to take notes with a regular pencil directly on the screen,
while the other has a lag-free stylus input that’s delightful to use.
The most expensive among them is a super affordable $349, which is
roughly what netbooks used to cost, and there’s more than a passing
similarity between these ultra basic Lenovo Chromebooks and the classic
Eee PCs from years ago.
Vivo’s Apex concept phone
Vivo grabbed a lot of attention at CES 2018 by being the first company with a fingerprint reader integrated directly into the display,
and it followed that up with a concept phone at MWC that was even more
aggressively futuristic. The Apex concept device strips the bezels back
even further than we’re now getting used to, and it achieves that by
vibrating the screen so as to produce sound without an earpiece. Vivo
also shifts the selfie camera to a pop-up module that extends from the
top of the phone like a periscope. The Vivo Apex provided a fun exhibit
of the current thinking and deliberation among phone designers looking
for the next breakthrough.
The worst
The rise of iPhone X copycat notches
The flip side of the new, slimmed-down display bezels is
that they allow companies to do weird things with the particular layout
and design of their screens. And many, far too many, at MWC 2018 have
chosen to simply copy the look of the notch in Apple’s iPhone X. It’s a
cynical move, which Asus is especially guilty of and unapologetic about.
No one is even attempting to emulate Apple’s Face ID, which is the main
reason for the iPhone’s notch; companies are just aping the Apple
aesthetic with their own cosmetic alterations. The Asus Zenfone 5 thus
represents both sides of the new phone screen trends: the good of
slimming bezels and the bad of a deliberately derivative design.
The headphone jack is becoming a rarity
You know those big old ports on the back of desktop
computers that companies still keep supporting many years after no one
even remembers what they were for? That’s how the mobile industry
perceives the headphone jack nowadays. It’s treated as legacy hardware.
As such, the 3.5mm audio jack continues to be available on budget phone
models (along with the awful Micro USB connector)
and from some companies unwilling to follow the mainstream trend, such
as Samsung and LG. This year, Nokia and Sony both introduced new
flagships without a headphone jack, with their hope being that superior
Bluetooth audio codecs will cover for the loss of the convenient,
simple, and once-upon-a-time universal 3.5mm wire.
Samsung’s AR Emoji
They are dreadful, aren’t they? In its effort to keep
pace with Apple’s iPhone and iOS, Samsung this week introduced its
answer to Animoji
in the form of its own AR Emoji. Technically speaking, these are rather
impressive facial scans, given that the Galaxy S9 only uses the
front-facing camera and no additional specialized equipment to produce
them. But in practice, you get some rather weird, misshapen creations,
whose facial animations are worse than anything we’ve seen since Mass Effect: Andromeda came out.
LG’s cynical V30 rebadge
There are many industries in which a company will take an
existing product, make a couple of cosmetic tweaks, and then reissue it
under a new brand name. With phones, however, the rate of technological
change and progress has always been so fast as to make that
unnecessary. In 2018, LG has shown that the mobile industry is starting
to fall in line with others by reissuing the LG V30 under a new product
title of LG V30S ThinQ. The new V30 is identical to the old one, save
for the addition of some extra RAM and storage. Everything novel about
the V30S, of which there isn’t much, will be back-ported to the V30 in a
software update. So LG simply used MWC 2018 as a launch platform for a
software patch. Underwhelming to an extreme. (Via theVerge)
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