Brace yourself for the biggest smartphone battle in 2017

2016 has been very entertaining indeed in the smartphone realm with major hits and misses, successes and disasters and with how the game has been reshuffled one would have to wonder what to expect come 2017.

We kick it off with the fan favourite Samsung which was set to launch the successor to the Galaxy S7 that is the S8 in February 2017 at the Mobile World Congress.

Apparently this release date has been moved to April due to a shortage in supply of the Snapdragon 835 chip which should power these devices. However will it sell though? It will be interesting to see how big a fan base Samsung still has after the debacle it had with the Note7.

The rumoured specifications are also flagship worthy too with Samsung probably joining the dual camera band wagon with dual 12MP cameras.

Display might come in the form of a 5.7 inch AMOLED display of the usual 1440 x 2560 (2K) display. Storage options are rumoured to be a whopping 8GB of RAM and 64 or 128GB worth of internal storage with expansion of up to 256GB via a microSD card slot.

With how aggressive Samsung is on innovation and the pursuit of being ahead of the game we are eager to see what tricks they have under their sleeves.

We head off to LG which looks like it might just steal the crowd from Samsung’s absence. It will be launching the LG G6 which is successor to the not-so-great-selling G5 (and friends).

The G5 was hoping to bring back the modular style of smartphones, a project that was dumped by Google in September this year.

According to rumours and leaked renders it seems the LG G6 will be ditching the modular setup probably in favour of the increasingly popular enhanced resistance to dust and liquids. This will mean the death of user replaceable batteries in smartphones.

If the G6 launches sooner than the S8 it might mean a brighter 2017 for LG hoping they fixed their elementary defect that is a poorly soldered CPU causing the units to suffer from bootloop has FINALLY been fixed. My LG G4 was subject to this manufacturing flaw and after reaching out to LG Global this was their response.

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.

We apologize for the inconvenience this issue has caused. For further information please refer to the statement below.

“LG Electronics has been made aware of a booting issue with the LG G4 smartphone has now been identified as resulting from a loose contact between components.

Customers who are experiencing booting issues with their LG G4s should contact their local carrier from where the G4 was purchased or a nearby LG Service Center (www.lg.com/common) for repair under full warranty.

Customers who purchased their G4 devices from non-carrier retailers should contact an LG Service Center with the understanding that warranty conditions will differ.

LG Electronics is committed to providing the highest standards of product quality and customer service and apologizes for the inconvenience caused to some of our customers who initially received incorrect diagnoses.

Recent reports have seen their latest flagship Phablet, the V20 also suffering from this same predicament to which we would like to suggest will not do much favours for this Korean tech giant’s smartphone sales.

Then comes another fan favourite. The iPhone. I don’t know about you but i’m sure you share my sentiments of Apple holding back a bit. The iPhone 7 came out with a refreshed iPhone 6 design and subtle changes to the chipset, the camera and addition of water resistance to the mix.

But hold on a minute. Next year is the iPhone’s 10th year anniversary and one might speculate Apple has deliberately been taking it easy on the updates because of the big reveal next year. Will the next iPhone or iPhones leave the competition in the dust? Well let’s head over to the rumours and find out.

For starters the name will be a hard one to crack but the most convincing ones are iPhone 7S, iPhone X and iPhone Anniversary Edition.

Interesting on the spec sheet is a curved edge-to-edge display of OLED technology, removal of the physical home button to be replaced with a virtual one and a fingerprint scanner integrated into the display.

The Chinese also want a piece of the action with the likes of Huawei moving up the ladder in the top 3 most profitable smartphone manufacturers to second place behind apple and releasing a pretty solid phablet with clever tech that can give the best in the business a run for their money.

Huawei will be releasing a P10 first quarter of next year and though most of the tech will most likely be borrowed from the Mate 9 but the designers are going to need to get their creative juices flowing because it looks like it will be open season with every manufacturer going all out pencils blazing to bring something the market would fight.

Gionee also recently unveiled the M2017 which is a high end, midrange phablet with an insane 7000mAh battery or rather two 3500mAh batteries.

Specs include a recent Snapdragon 653 processor, a Quad HD curved AMOLED display of 5.7 inches, dual rear camera (12MP + 1.3MP), 8MP front camera, 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage with no expandable storage or a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The Gionee is selling for a stratospheric 6999 Yuan (1006.06 USD at time of writing). Pretty steep considering it features a mid range chipset and a very love/hate design language not forgetting it doesn’t have a decent enough pedigree.

Nokia is back in the business and is rumoured to be launching 4 devices this year with one of them getting announced at MWC again. We won’t get our hopes up though as the list of devices hints a slew of mid rangers. one that has been popular is the Nokia D1C .

Looks like 2017 will be a fierce battleground in the smartphone realm. Better get to hitting double shifts and second jobs. Only pockets with the best stamina will survive 2017.