Without looking for any leaks or rumours, I bet you can probably draw most of the phones that were rumored to be launched at Mobile World Conference next week. Over the years, smartphones have settled into a relatively consistent design formula of large, rectangular touchscreens, small cutouts for selfie cameras, app-based interfaces, and large camera notches with an array of different lenses. But more than a decade and a half into the smartphone era, I'm becoming more and more curious about what comes next and why current attempts to reinvent smartphones like foldables struggle to become mainstream.
In my opinion, a lot of the answers come down to applications. We hardly think about it because it's so easy to take for granted that all your third-party software will work on your next phone, but you'd never consider buying a device that couldn't run your banking app or transportation service of choice. Just look at Huawei, which went from challenging Apple to become the world's second-largest smartphone maker to scrapping its Android license and falling out of the top five entirely. First-party apps are the foundation of a smartphone, but third-party software is what makes it feel like your personal gadget.
Applications are important! But apps also bear a lot of the blame for why phones look the same now and why any attempt to move from a traditional form factor and interface faces an uphill battle.
Obviously, it is possible to change the form factor of a smartphone without breaking third-party apps. But literally millions of apps have been optimized to work with screens of roughly the same size and aspect ratios. This makes the argument for, say, an expensive new foldable device a lot weaker when many of your most used apps don't make the most of its larger screen and instead stretch out awkwardly to fill the extra space or even display with black bars down either side. Smart software solutions and multitasking support help, but they make investing in big change less exciting.
So what can a manufacturer do if it wants to turn things around? The more traditional approach is the diplomatic approach, which is to convince third-party developers to support your new initiative. (Just look at Nothing releasing an SDK for the flashing Glyph interface for its phones.) But lately, we've been seeing next-gen devices trying to take apps out of the equation entirely. At CES in January, we saw Rabbit introduce the R1, a new $199 gadget that promised to use artificial intelligence to simplify the process of accessing existing applications. At MWC, AI startup Brain.ai says it plans to showcase its so-called “app-less phone” concept in partnership with Deutsche Telekom.
The lofty promise of the Brain.ai device is that it will have “an app-free interface that predicts and generates the next interface in context, flowing with your thoughts.” The concept device appears to be based on Deutsche Telekom's existing T Phone but with an interface based on Brain.ai's Natural iOS app. The program feels like a more visual version of Google Assistant or Siri, responding to spoken or written prompts with its own interface rather than directing you to the app.
I think it's too early to say whether these unproven AI-powered devices have any hope of displacing the traditional smartphone as our primary personal and mobile computing devices. And it's clear that there will be no shortage of traditional launches at this year's MWC:
- Xiaomi is giving the currently China-exclusive Xiaomi 14 a global launch, where it looks set to be joined by the Xiaomi 14 Ultra, the company's latest phone with a large one-inch camera sensor.
- HMD, which until now exclusively made Nokia-branded phones, announced last year that it planned to release devices under its name for the first time. Could we see the first of these products announced at MWC?
- It appears that Honor is ready to announce pricing for its new Porsche-themed special edition of its Magic V2 foldable phone. The Magic 6 Pro is also being launched globally, after debuting in China in January.
- Three years after launching its first smartwatch, OnePlus is launching its OnePlus Watch 2 smartwatch with a battery life of up to 100 hours.
Alongside these commercial launches, it seems likely that we will also see more experimental devices. There have been many leaks pointing to a transparent laptop from Lenovo, and I suspect we will see its subsidiary Motorola show off the bendable smartphone concept it showed off last October. This would be in line with the company's approach at MWC last year, when it showed off foldable laptop and smartphone concepts. It goes without saying that third-party app support is a less pressing issue with concept devices like this that are unlikely to be released commercially anytime soon.
Optimization, that endless process of tweaking and smoothing out the rough edges to improve existing smartphone designs, is never a bad thing. But if manufacturers want to move on from selling increasingly capable black rectangles, they'll face an uphill battle unless they can work harmoniously with millions of third-party apps that have been through their own optimization process for more than a decade.
It's too early to say whether AI-powered devices like the Rabbit R1 or Brain.ai and Deutsche Telekom's “app-less” smartphone concept are the answer. But it's an acknowledgment that everything that comes after smartphones today needs to either build on our massive app ecosystems or be very creative in working around them.
