There was the time when mobile devices were small, next to useless in today's term, but could last like forever on a single charge.
When touchscreen became a trend and internet coming in more places, devices became larger and larger. and also a lot more powerful.
Most modern smartphones are powered by either Apple's iOS or Google's Android. With a slate appearance, most high-end smartphones started to use premium materials with metal rims sandwiched by a front-facing glass and a glass/metal back.
Then in 2017, the time when smartphone innovations seemed to have died with most doing the same thing, a small change happened. But that small change, changed pretty much everything. Two things happened: manufacturers went all-screen, and started baking Artificial Intelligence (AI) inside of their devices.
One of the most prominent that started the trend, was Samsung with the Galaxy S8. Introducing a bezel-less design, the company was able to shrink most of the non-screen part of the display down. As a result, the S8 has a much bigger screen, but with a size similar to its predecessor.
Many devices that were introduced later, followed similar patterns.
There are many advantages of this bezel-less design. From improved viewing experience to better utilization of screen size while retaining a minimum smartphone size. However, there are several disadvantages that include increased fragility and apps need to be optimized for the unique screen ratio (18:9, rather than the regular 16:9 widescreen ratio).
2017 also saw the rise of AI inside smartphones.
While Mixed Reality has also came to mobile devices, connectivity to external devices that include smartwatches and health trackers, and pretty much everything else, use AI for faster processing.
AI on smartphones powers voice commands, digital assistant, smart prediction, and many others, including Apple's Face ID. In 2017, smartphone manufacturers started to put AI chips inside their devices, making machine learning to work locally.
Read: Knowing The Differences Between Apple's Face ID And Samsung's Iris Scanning Technology
Local AI processing has many benefits. First of all, the device won't have to connect itself to the internet and won't be relying on servers to run. What this means, users don't need an internet connection to use many of their smartphone features. Second, users won't be sending personal data to third-parties, making things faster and also safer.
"Speed for the right applications makes it imperative to do things on the device, but the other thing is privacy," said Google’s vice president product manager Mario Queiroz.
He gave an example of Google Now Playing feature on the Pixel 2 that uses a local database of songs to identify music in the background and only connects to Google's servers if the user wants to find out more information about the song or add it to a playlist.
“There are more and more things that can and should be done on the device, which will be very beneficial for privacy.”
To make this possible, smartphones came equipped with specialized AI processing chips. Those that have used this in 2017 include Google, Huawei and also Apple.
With hardware technologies, multiprocessor chips and powerful cameras, smartphones can practically do almost any daily digital connectivity, interaction and computing needs. However, battery technologies don't evolve as fast, resulting smartphones to last just about a day or two on average, on a single charge.
Here is where AI plays a bit of role.
Manufacturers that use local machine learning, use their AI to understand users' behavior. By learning the patterns of how users use their smartphones, manufacturers expect to increase performance and improving battery life
Huawei is an example. With its AI, the manufacturer aims to predict when its user is likely to open a particular app, and make the phone to be ready at the said time and load the app as fast as possible. The user won't know it happens, but instead see an improved performance.
Similarly, the AI can extend battery by minimizing system apps that aren't frequently used, optimizing and reserving the device's processing power for apps that are used more often. The result is a smartphone that lasts longer with the same size of battery.
This, at least in theory.
Read: Apple's IPhone Performance Issue: It Starts When The Battery Gets Older