There will be a number of interesting shifts in the world of smartphones this year. What will the main trends of 2021 be?
AR applications
The new iPhone 12 Pro (1157.97 euros) contains a LiDAR scanner. This makes your smartphone better able to estimate the depth of a room. By filming a room, your smartphone ‘sees’ what is where. This information can then be used for augmented reality applications. In concrete terms: the Pikachu you want to catch in Pokémon Go will be right in front of you at the table. There are other advantages: the better depth perception also your photos are a lot sharper.
Faster chips and processors Processors
Once seemed a bit nerdy to be amazed by the technology of a new smartphone, but that hasn’t been the case for a few years now. The A12 chip is one of the main reasons to buy an iPhone SE (434 euros). The powerful Snapdragon 888 will be in many Android top models next year. The latter focuses, among other things, on the processing of AI and will use energy more efficiently than its predecessors.
Flip-phones
The foldable phones had disappeared from the radar for ten years, but seem to be making a modest comeback. Think of the Motorola Razr 5G (1394 euros) or the Huawei Mate X. It is still too early to make a definitive decision whether it is just a gimmick, because we can also expect a few foldable smartphones in 2021. Until now, those devices were often very expensive: the Samsung Galaxy Fold , for example, costs more than 2000 euros! The same Samsung would, according to insiders, come with an affordable version. And it can be even crazier because both Samsung and LG would come with a rollable smartphone in 2021 or 2022.
Smartphones for gaming
The future of the gaming world – just like that of television and music – is partly in streaming. You notice that on a platform like Google Stadia, with which you can play games wherever you want. On
your television, laptop, tablet or… on your smartphone. Until now, it was mainly niche players such as Asus who bet on that market, with devices that have a high refresh rate (or refresh rate : the number of times per second that display hardware can refresh all its pixels and thus become smoother) and long battery life. In the coming months and years, more and more players will undoubtedly tap into that market.
