Technology marches ever forward and right now might be the time to finally be excited about smartphones again. There are some big changes coming up for almost every physical component of a smartphone and, for the first time in a while, those changes might be worth paying attention to.
Frankly, most people find phones boring. Smartphone enthusiasts and tech-focused people who have an interest in keeping up with them will always be curious about where the industry is going, but even those people are rarely surprised or impressed with what new phones can do. People outside of the gadget-fan niche, though, barely even know when new phones come out. Most people within the Apple ecosystem don't even know what Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system by an order of magnitude, is. Most Android users have never heard of iMessage. People who aren't tech nerds really just see most phones as rectangular pieces of glass or plastic that allow them to check social media and send texts.
There's a good chance, though, that a lot of the things people haven't paid attention to with new phones will soon emerge into the public consciousness in a major way. Those who follow the scene intentionally are already aware of some of the upgrades we can expect soon, which include changes to phones and the networks powering them. People who don't pay much attention to words like "Snapdragon" are also growing curious about ideas like 5G. The lowest common denominator for what the average person knows about phones is slowly rising, just as phones become more accessible – and a similar combination is what led to people slowly adopting flatscreen televisions.
In some ways, it's already starting, albeit, in a negative way, with 5G. The conspiracy theories and misinformation around 5G have understandably turned some people off, but those things have also promoted the idea. By comparison, were many people outside of the tech bubble talking about how 4G LTE would impact their neighborhood before it arrived? 5G has slowly become a buzzword and once it becomes more normalized in people's lives (after the pandemic fears have subsided to a degree) it's likely people will shift from associating it with stuff like cancer to recognizing it as an amazing technological leap. It helps that the rollout is inevitable either way. 5G phones will start to have more reasonable prices and coverage will improve as well, leaving people with demonstrably faster internet on their phones, and all of the new possibilities that will bring.
2019 was the year in which foldable smartphones became more than just prototypes. While they're not entirely successful per se, they're a great example of the variety of appearances we can expect from phones in the near future. Displays are getting thinner, while also now taking up the entirety of a phone's front panel, making 2020's phones look like something Tony Stark would use, even when compared to 2017's smartphones. Sure, they're also getting resolution bumps which are easy to ignore, and refresh rate increases that are much more noticeable, but phones are about to become more eye-catching than they've been since before the first iPhone.
Aside from the look, upcoming smartphones are going to become a bigger part of our lives due to the Internet of Things. 5G and Wi-Fi 6 should usher in new devices with which we'll interface using a phone. Technologies like Amazon Echo and Google Home get more popular every year, showing that we're already primed to rely on smart devices beyond what we hold in our hands. So phones will be even more useful, in addition to looking cooler, being faster, and slowly becoming more affordable.
