IPHONE 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Call it the iPhone 8 or the iPhone 10, the buzz around the 10th anniversary iPhone is downright insane! One rumour suggests an edge-to-edge glass display with a home button and fingerprint sensor integrated directly into the display, while another more mundane one suggests a move from LCD displays to curved OLED displays. There’s even talk of long-range wireless charging, done in an inimitable Apple way… either which way, come September, a heavily revamped iPhone will be yours for the desiring!
MICROSOFT’S SURFACE PHONE
After the debacle of the Nokia Lumia range, Microsoft’s set to deliver a phone worthy of the hallowed Surface brand, the “ultimate mobile device” (CEO Satya Nadella’s words, not mine!) that’ll convert iOS- and Android-faithfuls. Said to launch in the year’s first quarter, the phone is expected to sport an all-metal aesthetic like the Surface Book, and pack in the Snapdragon 835 chip and up to 500GB storage with 8 gigs of memory! Windows 10 will let you plug the phone into a dock and work like a PC. I expect this Continuum feature to be Microsoft’s Trojan Horse in its war against Google and Apple.
GOOGLE SMARTWATCHES
The Android smartwatch category hasn’t quite taken off despite the best efforts of practically every tech brand, but as with the Pixel smartphones, Google’s out to show the market how it’s done — by doing it themselves! Two new smartwatches are on the horizon, codenamed Angelfish and Swordfish, and they’re due in the first quarter of 2017 to show off Google’s new Android Wear 2.0 platform. Android Wear 2.0 watches will be able to run Google’s AI Assistant and make payments via Android Pay without being tethered to a smartphone.
NOKIA’S ANDROID PHONE
The Finnish brand finally plans to do what it should have done much earlier — release a full-featured Android phone. Expected to be unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2017, the flagship P1 device is rumoured to sport a 2K-res display, the latest Qualcomm chip with 6GB memory, the latest Android 7.0.1 Nougat and a capable Carl Zeiss-powered camera, all in a water-sealed durable form factor.
SAMSUNG GALAXY S8
After a rather mixed 2016, the S8 needs to be big for Samsung this year, and all the rumours suggest the brand IS making it big! The “Plus” variant is expected to hit in April with a 6-in display, larger than the ill-fated Note 7’s 5.7-inch screen. Except, this time around, one’s hearing that Samsung will go with a zero-bezel curved-screen design, which means that the 6-in device won’t be much bigger than the Note 7 it replaces. Dig deeper into the Samsung patent portfolio and there’s even a foldable screen concept that’s waiting in the wings for a product launch in 2017. Thanks to the Note line’s tainted name, you can be pretty sure there’s going to be no separate Note 8 this year — hopefully, we won’t have any problems bringing the S8s onboard our flights this year.
XBOX ‘PROJECT SCORPIO’
PlayStation 4 Pro or Xbox One S? These decisions are so 2016 — the future of gaming is called Project Scorpio. When Microsoft dubs the next-gen Xbox as the “most powerful console ever” and follows that up with a device that has got eight CPU cores, 320GB-per-second memory and with the graphical prowess that can crunch at 6 teraflops at full 4K (the current PS4 Pro does 4.2 teraflops), you know they’re not kidding! In the offing is a console that can run games at 4K resolution at an insane 60 frames a second, and support VR gameplay! This is likely to take the fragmented, fledgling VR industry mainstream!
NINTENDO SWITCH
Nintendo has been popular with younger audiences (and the young at heart), but the company’s looking to switch things up with the… Switch. The Switch, expected to hit stores in March, isn’t just a home gaming console. With its tablet form factor and detachable controllers on either side, you can play games using both controllers… or play with your friends with each player using one controller. Back home, the console plugs into a docking station and you can continue your gameplay on your big TV. It may not have the pure gaming muscle of the Sony and Microsoft consoles, but if we’ve learnt anything from the Wii, that isn’t necessary!
TIRED TRENDS I WANT TO RETIRE
Super-thin phones: It seems every year brings a new “slimmest” phone, but I’m guessing most folks would happily sacrifice some of that extreme thinness to get a bigger battery inside their phone. We’re already past the point where some phones hurt the hand when gripped too hard — they’re that slim and sharp! Please stop the slimming wars already.
Stingy phone storage: The days of packing in a mere 8GB or 16GB storage in a phone is long gone, dear smartphone brands. Start with 32GB and upwards of storage on your flagship devices. Also can we scrap that Hybrid dual SIM nonsense?
Cheap fitness trackers: There’s a surfeit of inaccurate fitness trackers that really do no more in terms of activity tracking than your phone can with the right apps. Plus there’s one more device to charge!
Cookie-cutter smartwatches: Good smartwatches are few and far between with most brands opting to push those out with that one vital flaw — one-day battery life. So brands, either innovate or perish!
Umpteen WhatsApp groups: You either become the recipient of mundane (at times foul) forwards, or chats rapidly turn into heated discussions, name-calling and all! Enough.
VIRTUAL REALITY VS MIXED REALITY
With the mainstreaming of virtual reality (VR) courtesy devices like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony PlayStation VR, many folks will get their first taste of “proper” VR this year, though its use will largely be restricted to gaming in the near future. You’re more likely to encounter augmented reality (AR) or “mixed” reality this year — if you’ve played the wildly popular Pokemon Go game, you’ve already had your first taste of AR — where information and images are overlaid over video from the real world to give you additional information or context. Both Apple and Google have expressed interest in AR, and the next iPhone is likely to include some basic AR capabilities baked into the operating system, much like Google’s Tango technology. Maybe even some stand-alone AR-ready glasses this year, without the creep factor that killed Google Glass, if we’re lucky?
6TRENDS
2-IN-1 THE DOMINANT PC FORM FACTOR
There’s only so much of innovation — bringing down the weight, cutting down the ports — that traditional laptop design lends itself to. Increasingly, PC brands are shifting focus to 2-in-1s, which feature tablet form factors with attachable keyboards. The flagging PC industry is seeing consumer interest in this form factor, and I expect most new PCs to be launched this year to follow a variation of the same formula.
GROUP VIDEO CALLING
One-to-one video calling is now a given, but towards the end of the year, group video calling suddenly saw a lot of attention from a number of popular services. It started with Skype and Google Hangouts introducing group video chats earlier last year, but it picked up steam with the late December announcements from Facebook, the teen-oriented social app Kik, enterprise chat app du jour Slack and mobile messaging behemoth Line. Live-streaming video from your mobile device has very much been a big breakout trend for 2016, and group video seems primed for hitting the big league this year.
LESS FAKE NEWS
Whether it’s the Trump election or India’s demonetisation-linked cash crunch, fake news has reared its ugly head in an altogether too-real manner in 2016, and both Facebook and Google struggle to deal with the massive misinformation crisis that plagues the sites. Facebook is already using third-party fact-checkers to weed out fake stories, but the company is expected to be aggressive in its use of machine learning to identify disputed stories and label them as such for the average user to be more aware of what’s likely true and what deserves some additional hoax-busting! For its part, Google has also been cutting off revenue to known fake news sites by banning these sites from advertising on their ad network.
TRULY “SMART” DEVICES
The last couple of years have seen voice assistants gain some smarts, but this past year was when AI burst into the mainstream with Google Assistant on Google’s Pixel and Home devices. In 2017, expect Siri and Assistant to become more proactive and predictive, and IoT devices such as security systems, smart home lighting and climate control systems to become better at second-guessing our behaviour. The smarts will extend to your favourite Internet services too, via chatbots. Consider this: in the mere eight months since Facebook made its chatbot platform public, thousands of chatbots have been born — some offering to help you pick gifts or book a flight, while others helping you order a pizza or with a banking query. Millions of dollars are being pumped into chatbot and conversational UI start-ups, which means we’re likely to see a lot of new products pushed out next year to consumers and enterprises alike.
INCREASE IN MOBILE FRAUD
Take two seminal events coming together — 4G-enabled Jio users dealing with the new realities of a cashless economy — towards the turn of the year, and you have a ready-made recipe for digital transaction fraud. ASSOCHAM estimates a 65 per cent rise in mobile fraud cases in 2017, with credit/debit card fraud and mobile phone data privacy breaches topping the list of digital crimes. Recent events have exposed the underbelly of digital wallet transactions, which are only set to go up as people opt to transact digitally, and the legal machinery is largely unprepared to deal with the dramatically changing volume and nature of cybercrime cases in 2017.
Tushar Kanwar is a tech columnist and commentator.
Follow him on Twitter @2shar
