(light techno music)
- So, Mobile World Congress 2018, what happened?
Well, here's what didn't happen:
Huawei didn't have new flagship phone.
LG didn't have a new new flagship phone.
They just rebranded their old flagship phone.
HTC, Motorola, no flagship phones.
But still, Samsung launched the Galaxy S9 and S9 plus.
Which are really widely-anticipated, but at the same time,
they left people quite a bit disappointed.
These are the first Samsung phones since the iPhone X.
We're kind of looking for something
a bit more aggressive from Samsung.
That being said, even though the design is quite similar
to the previous one, the finger print sensor
has moved to the middle.
Samsung has made hardware upgrades.
It has the latest chip.
It has a new camera, a really cool camera.
Has dual-aperture.
Uncool: Samsung's AR-emoji.
They're terrible, they're disturbing.
Nobody really likes them.
I don't know what's happening there with Samsung.
Also on the flagship front,
Sony has the Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 compact.
To me personally, they look like HTC U11 clones.
They have rounded glass back.
They have a finger print sensor in the middle on the back.
That's a new thing for Sony.
Also running Snapdragon 845.
Which the Galaxy S9 will do as well.
And Sony has a little advantage over Samsung.
Samsung just introduced super slow-mo 720p in the S9.
Sony has super slow-mo at 1080p.
Aside from major flagships,
one of the big stories here is Android Go.
Alcatel, ZTE, Nokia, Micromax, Lava.
There's a whole bunch of companies who are launching
super cheap, super affordable Android phones.
And the idea there, I mean we're talking about prices
like $49, and sub $100 prices,
is improving the entry-level Android experience.
Also from Nokia, they do have a new flagship,
Nokia 8 Sirocco.
But the more interesting one,
the one that's captured more imaginations,
is the Nokia 8110.
You might know the name already because it's a retro model.
It's a throwback to Nokia's matrix phone.
So this is the one that has a physical curve,
and it has a slider at the bottom.
Also cool about the 8110: it has LTE,
it actually has Google Assistant, and it is under $100.
So, it's a pretty kick ass phone,
and you can play snake on it.
(mellow music)
Two of the really major things here at MWC 2018
have been 5G and AI.
They are absolutely the buzz words for the show.
5G is kind of like the messiah.
Like, if you want a religious figure for technology,
that's what 5G is.
It's the promise of the future.
Nothing is really happening with it right now.
There are no phones no tablets that you can buy with 5G.
Companies are showing off prototypes,
but we can't really see anything.
And 5G also goes into like enterprise applications,
eHealth, connected cars,
and all these things which are a few years down the line.
As to AI, it feels like something the companies
are just kind of tacking onto their products
without really thinking about it too much.
Asus, I have to say, is guiltiest of this.
They claim to have AI boost,
AI camera, AI photo learning.
They even had an AI ringtone.
It's getting ridiculous.
They're not really doing all that much that
can really be described as artificial intelligence,
but it's a buzz word that everybody's
kind of tacking on to and trying to sell products with.
As for smartphone hardware:
one of the biggest differences this year
versus last is that pretty much every
new smartphone, especially the Android side,
especially in the higher spec, has very thin bezels.
I love the fact that bezels are just kind of dying
everywhere that you look nowadays.
The bad side of that though,
a whole bunch of companies are copying the Apple notch.
The apple notch, on the iPhone X,
is justified by having faceID, which is super sophisticated
biometric authentication system.
Nobody else is doing anything near that.
They're just copying the notch.
It's superficial, it's cosmetic.
Not a fan of that trend.
So even though it's not a retail product,
the Vivo Apex is one of the highlights here at MWC 2018.
This has practically no bezels,
even thinner bezels around the display.
And the way that company achieves it
is an integrated selfie cam, inside the body,
which pops up from above the screen.
Any time you can get that sort of
mechanical engineering built into a smartphone,
people are going to get hyped up about it.
That being said Vivo has also evolved the fingerprint ID
system that had built into the display
and showed off at CES 2018.
In this new concept that covers
the lower third of the phone's display.
And finally, even though MWC is traditionally a phone show,
Huawei and Lenovo actually had some
really cool laptops to show off.
Huawei introduced the Matebook X Pro.
Which is another one of those super-thin,
high-spec'd windows laptop that you've seen everywhere,
but this one has extra-extra-thin bezels.
It has something like a 90 percent screen to body ratio,
has a 3:2 aspect ratio.
So, actually, it's a bit more square
than most laptop screens, which I really like.
It's great for writing on.
And, also, it has a hidden webcam.
Which is a little mechanical button.
Which pops up from just above the keyboard.
Which is cool in terms of design, but might not be the best
in terms of creating flattering selfies.
As to Lenovo, it introduced some new Chromebooks.
Which aren't pretty, but they also aren't expensive.
And are terrific for taking notes on them.
One of them, you can take notes with just a regular pencil.
And the other one, it has a lag free stylus.
I tried it myself, it uses one of Google's chromeOS API's.
And it's super, it's just a great experience
for taking notes and both of those are under $300.
It seems like, this year, many of the big Android companies
just weren't ready to go into the flagship
phones here at MWC.
That's left us with a different show.
There's less unusual hardware hype,
fewer headphone jacks, more AI blaster, and more notches.