New Year, New Gear

In an industry where new tech and next-big-thing products rise meteorically and crash and burn within a timespan of a few months, making technology predictions, even educated ones, is particularly risky, and coming on the heels of the rollercoaster year that’s gone by, even more so. As we close out this year, I put my ear to the ground and take a punt at what will be big in tech in the year ahead — products you should expect, and trends that will unfold.

Smartphones made a big leap forward in 2017, cramming bigger screens into smaller phone sizes as the bezel-less trend caught the fancy of the industry and consumer alike. Apple went a step forward and did away with the home button altogether, opting to navigate the iPhone X via a series of swipes and taps, and you can expect to see iPhones next year push the new screen interaction further. The all-screen iPhone XI (or whatever it’s called) will likely be available in two sizes — a normal size and a mega-sized ‘Plus’ variant, and both will build on the FaceID facial recognition from 2017 to let you do more with your glances and face movements, taking the tech beyond unlocking your phone.

But it’s likely to be one of the Androids, possibly the OnePlus 6, that will pull off a feature that even the iPhone X couldn’t at launch — a fingerprint scanner embedded into the display itself! Qualcomm’s ultrasonic Snapdragon Sense ID 3D Fingerprint Technology, shown off on a Vivo prototype earlier this year, has finally reached a point where it can be included into mainstream phones, and I fully expect brands to serve up in-screen-fingerprint-scanners as a differentiator for their all-screen phones next year. Now, while we’re on the matter of displays, I expect foldable displays — stuff we’ve been seeing in prototypes that pop up every now and then — to finally hit the market in the coming year. Of particular interest is the much-rumored Samsung Galaxy X, which uses a bendable screen on the inside of a classic flip-phone form factor, revealing a big expansive screen when opened up.

Samsung’s new S9/S9+ are expected to bring imaging firepower to the forefront, adding in the dual camera skills we’ve seen on the Note 8 and possibly a much-rumoured super slow-motion 1000 frames per second shooting mode as well. Yet, if there’s anything that 2017 has showed us, it’s that hardware can only do so much, and that computational photography, the likes of which we’ve seen in Google’s stellar Pixel devices, will be the ‘X’ factor in mobile imaging. Unlike traditional photography, computational photography uses data from multiple images shot together, possibly at different exposures or from different camera sensors, and combines it algorithmically to create a photo that is crisper, richer and more detailed.

Underneath it all, artificial intelligence will move into many aspects of our digital lives. In 2018, AI will increasingly take on more ‘human’ tasks, gauging what it sees (facial recognition), what it hears (voice-based digital assistants like Alexa) and what it thinks you’re feeling (analysing your social media, feedback from your fitness trackers, among others) to preempt your next move, and AI-optimised chips from companies like Huawei, Qualcomm and Apple will enable faster, on-device AI across a range of devices.

And then there’s the fun stuff to look forward to, like the Oculus Go standalone VR headset (which does away with the phone or the cables running to the PC) and the Magic Leap One, a mixed-reality retinal display which superimposes 3D computer-generated imagery over real world objects, by projecting a digital light field into the user’s eye! And as drone regulations ease up, I expect a glut of smaller drones swarming our skies and giving us a fresh new perspective to everyday visuals.