Smartphones Are Now in Need of Some Old Technology

  In MWC this year, Nokia/HMD and Blackberry shadowed many other smartphones manufacturers with their news conference, and it is so strange because it’s no longer 2007 and these two brands are no longer at their peak periods.

  Blackberry was fighting against Nokia with its unique hardware and system when Symbian was leading the market, and after several years, Blackberry drowned in the flood of smartphones. In MWC this year, with the release of Keyone with QWERTY keyboard, Blackberry made itself a hot topic in SNS.

  HMD Global re-launched Nokia 3310 in the last 5 minutes of their conference which caused a sensation though 3310 is not a main product, and it seemed that people cared more about the snake game rather than the borderless screen.

  HMD Global and Blackberry’s phones are made for the minority market, so they would have no threat to other smartphone manufacturers. However, though 3310 costs only $52, it has mostly expected features like 1 month standby time, light weight, portable and wrestling. Let’s hope these two products pushing other manufacturers to pay attention to some long-existed problems.

Smartphones' Home ButtonGone and Earphone Hole Kept

  The release of iPhone 7 led a trend of eliminating earphone holes of smartphones, and to keep up with that, Moto Z and HTC Bolt all replaced these 3.5mm holes with USB Type-C, however, due to the resistance of customers, smartphones with no 3.5mm earphone holes are no longer taking the leading position, and in MWC this year, 3.5mm holes showed up again in all new devices.

  iPhone 7 did really contribute to the development of wireless earphone market, but most manufacturers didn’t follow Apple on this.

Another funny fact is that there are more and more smartphones give up on using physical home button, devices like Samsung Galaxy S8, Xiaomi Mix and Huawei P9 have all abandoned home buttons.