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It' been nearly a year
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since the iPhone X was announced.
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It is the biggest leap forward since the original iPhone.
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Which means it's been a year
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of all the other phone manufacturers
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trying in some way to capture the mystique
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and the endless chatter about the iPhone X.
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So if that meant shipping a new phone with a notch,
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or adapting a new gesture based UI,
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that's what phone makers have done this year.
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Okay, to be fair it's not like everyone's waiting to see
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what Apple's going to do in September,
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and then rushing to copy them necessarily.
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Most phones are in production for many months
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before they ship to consumers,
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but Apple has the uncanny ability to set the tone
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for what a premium phone is going to look like.
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Here are some examples.
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The notch is the most obvious physical attribute
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that started popping up on phones this year,
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and it was driven by one key design choice,
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bezel-less screens.
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If the display takes up the whole face of the phone,
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there's no place to put the camera, or a 3D sensor,
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or a speaker, so the solution is a cutout.
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Now Apple actually wasn't first to this.
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The Essential Phone, which launched last August
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has a round notch at the top here.
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Then came the iPhone X,
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and the notch became a big topic of conversation.
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After that Huawei, OnePlus, LG, Xiaomi,
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all released phones with some sort of notch, among others.
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Some people really hate the notch.
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Personally, I don't mind it so much,
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but we do have Apple to thank
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for bringing the notch into our smartphone vernacular.
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After the notch, the second most noticeable feature
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of this year's phones were glass backs.
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Now Apple of course had a glass back on the iPhone 4,
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and since then Samsung's had glass backed phones,
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but to support wireless charging,
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Apple rolled it out again with the iPhone 8 and iPhone X,
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after which glass backs were everywhere.
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What's interesting is that this trend even trickled down
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to what you might consider budget phones.
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Something like the Motorola G6,
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which costs a fifth of what the iPhone X costs.
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While this has given smartphones a nice premium look,
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it's also made them slippery as hell, case in point.
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But hey, it's probably been great for companies
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that make phone cases or you know,
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giant tech companies that offer repair services like Apple.
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Moving on, unlocking your phone
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with your fingerprint is so 2013.
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Last fall Apple raised the bar by introducing Face ID,
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which lets you unlock your iPhone X
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with you guessed it, your face.
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Now that raised all kinds of questions ranging from
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the important stuff like, how secure is Face ID?
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To the inane like, can I fool Face ID
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with a really well made mask of my face?
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Nope.
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Hi David.
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Now Samsung had been doing face recognition
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and iris scanning for awhile before,
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and others were pushing boundaries too.
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Chinese phone maker Vivo shipped a phone this year
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that has a fingerprint sensor built into the display.
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But Apple's Face ID has 3D depth sensors,
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which helps push face scanning to the next level,
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which brings me to Animoji.
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I mean really, what good would your $1000 smartphone be
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if you couldn't turn yourself into a goofy unicorn
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or have a bunch of farm animals
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sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody, right?
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In either case, the iPhone X's 3D sensors
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made animated emoji possible,
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and since no one wants to be seen as behind the curve
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or slow to adapt whatever new tech the kids are into,
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others followed suit.
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With the Galaxy S9 phone, Samsung rolled out AR Emoji.
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Now these aren't exactly the same as Animoji.
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Samsung's AR Emoji look like you, well sort of,
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but these also track your face and your movements.
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AR features in general were a big focus
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around the launch of the iPhone X, although again,
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Google Tango came first, which showed up
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in phones like the ZenFone AR last summer.
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Once Apple ditched the physical home button,
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it had to come up with a way for people
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to access apps and multitask,
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so we have this gesture based navigation,
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which is a long way of saying swiping, lots of swiping,
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but the system was clearly appealing enough
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for Google to mimic it in Android Pie,
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its newest mobile operating system.
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Google replaced the familiar lineup
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of three virtual buttons at the bottom of the phone
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with this single pill shaped icon.
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Swipe up and it shows you all of your open apps,
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which you can then swipe side to side on.
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Since this is software and not hardware
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that was predetermined months in advance,
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safe to say you can really see the Apple influence here.
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Now those are just a few examples of how Apple
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set the tone for phone design from last fall up until now,
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but the bigger question is,
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what trends are we going to see next?
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The short answer for now is, we don't really know.
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Samsung did just announce the new Galaxy Note 9 smartphone,
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but that looks pretty similar to last year's Galaxy Note 8.
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So again, we'll all be looking to see what Apple does.
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If Apple goes all glass again, it's already been done.
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If Apple makes a plus sized phone, it's been done before.
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If they go with a smaller phone,
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that's been done before too.
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If they make the camera better,
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well everybody is doing dual lens cameras
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and fancy portrait modes.
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Really, Apple's advantages are in design,
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engineering, and software.
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Unfortunately its software locks you in,
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but it also works well between devices
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and its hardware keeps converging more and more.
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The feature everyone tries to ace
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might not be a hardware feature.
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It might be an AI feature.
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Basically, how smart a smartphone can be,
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and that's when we'll find out
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who the real trendsetters are.
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