As we’re drawing to a close of the calendar year, it is time to look back and revisit what 2018 has brought to the mobile space. Unlike the PC industry, the mobile space follows a quite unrelenting and precise release schedule – meaning that we’re guaranteed new products every year: This can be a double-edged sword for new flagship mobile devices, as new technologies can be either ready at the leading edge of a new product cycle – or in the worst case they can miss the current generation altogether by a few months and have to be relegated to the next generation. Overall, smartphone companies have an incredibly complex task at hand in attempting to deliver products that not only represent an improvement to last year’s devices, but also to be able to distinguish themselves from the current competition. In this piece, we’ll have a closer look at the distinguishing trends of 2018 and how major players have executed their strategies this cycle.

How 2018 Will Be Remembered: Major Smartphone Camera Leaps

If I were to be asked what 2018’s flagship smartphones most defining characteristic would be, then I’d say their cameras. Essentially every vendor in 2018 has made significant leaps in terms of their camera performance, improving quality and adding new features. This year more than ever, we saw a significant amount of products make the camera their key selling point.

Starting off early in the year, Samsung lead the way with the release of the Galaxy S9. The S9’s camera on paper wasn’t too unusual, apart from the fact that the main camera module employed a new innovative dual-aperture mechanism. Samsung’s gains here were defined by sheer improvements of the camera hardware: The new sensor along with the new lens mechanism had raised the bar in terms of overall detail and sharpness, an aspect of the camera in which Samsung still maintains top marks up till today.

Another player whose camera improvements can be attributed to significant hardware leaps is Apple. The new iPhone XS and XR’s new camera module saw a major improvements in the sensor, with new larger pixels as well as a notably improved DTI implementation. The combination of great hardware and robust and consistent software processing made the new iPhone XS one of the best cameras of 2018.

The Year Where Camera Software Outshone Camera Hardware

Although Samsung’s and Apple’s camera improvements were significant – it was more or less an expected result of the newer generation hardware. While the hardware advances this year were solid, nothing left a quite an as quite as lasting impression as Huawei’s new computational photography on the P20 Pro and Mate 20 Pro.

[ Mate 20Pro   ] - [ P20Pro    ] - [ Pixel 3 ] 
 [ iPhone XS ]  - [ S9+ ] - [ LG G7 ] - [ OnePlus 6 ] 

Night mode on Huawei devices was something that was part of the company’s camera experience for a couple of years now – but it required use of a tripod to be able to get good results. The introduction of a new revamped hand-held Night Mode on the P20 Pro sparked a new era of true computational photography, achieving new levels of low-light performance that in the past would have been hard to imagine on a smartphone.

It’s only been recently, and almost half a year later that other companies followed suit: Most notable was Google’s “Night Sight” mode that was announced along the Pixel 3, with the feature also coming to the Pixel 2 and original Pixel. Here Google was able to one-up Huawei in terms of the low-light processing prowess.

I do think Huawei deserves a lot of credit for being a pioneer in terms of its use of computational photography: We’ve seen already many companies such as OnePlus and Xiaomi release new models and new camera software updates which bring night mode implementations of their own. I really do expect this feature to be a key checkmark item for smartphone vendors in 2019, with essentially all other major vendors following suit with new custom implementations.

The More Cameras the Merrier?

Another big trend by which 2018 smartphones will be remembered by, is the increasing amount of cameras on a smartphone. This year in particular has been pretty much the year in which having a telephoto module on your smartphone has become a mainstream feature. There’s still exceptions to this, particularly the smaller S9 from Samsung, along with Google’s Pixel phones. Vendors who don’t have a telephoto module per se, do still offer some added functionality with a second sensor; LG continued with its use of a wide-angle lens in the G7, while vendors such as OnePlus advertise the second sensor as being used for depth information.

In the last months of 2018 we saw the increase in camera modules go quite in the extreme: Instead of having to choose between either a telephoto or a wide-angle module, vendors such as Huawei, LG and Samsung have now started offering the trifecta of rear-camera configurations. Huawei’s introduction of a wide-angle module in the new Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro make for a great addition to the capture experience, and we now finally see an alternative to LG in terms of seeing another major device offering the feature. Conversely, we also saw LG going the three-camera route in the new V40, adding for the first time a telephoto module in its new flagship. Much like the “night mode”, I expect the camera trifecta to be a key checkmark feature for flagship devices in 2019.

How 2018 Will Also Be Remembered: The Display Notch and its Repercussions

Apple’s 2017 iPhone X was the phone that pretty much “popularised” the display notch. While Apple wasn’t exactly the first company to introduce this, it paved the way for other companies to introduce designs that, wouldn’t it have been for the iPhone X, maybe wouldn’t have come to market with the designs that they did end up with.

Now I personally never really felt all that strongly about display notches for most of 2018: It was just something that I acknowledged to be there, but otherwise wasn’t neither a big positive nor negative for the phones. Huawei’s, LG’s and OnePlus’s first implementations this summer all worked quite seamlessly, and all of them allowed for “blacking out” the notch ears if one so wished.

Mate 20 Pro and Mate 20

Among Android devices, I think the only questionable implementations of the notch were on the Pixel 3 XL and on the Mate 20 Pro. The former just had an absurdly tall double-height notch that aesthetically just really wasn’t pleasant, all while having much inferior software options in terms of customising the “ears”. The Mate 20 Pro’s notch is the one that was most similar to the iPhone X; both in terms of functionality as well as design. Here I think the wider design actually hindered things on the software side, as I felt there wasn’t enough space left for the notification bar elements.

OnePlus 6

Now there’s arguably a lot of discussion if the display notch is worth it, but one thing that every company seems to agree on is that this is just an interim solution while everybody is working towards the goal of bezel-less devices. In fact, some companies this year have resorted to some quite radical designs; The Oppo Find X has a motorised camera housing sliding out of the top of the phone, hiding both front-facing and rear-facing cameras beneath the front screen and back glass. Another implementation is adopted by Honor, Xiaomi and Lenovo, devices such as the Honor Magic 2, Mi MIX3 and the new Z5 Pro, where the whole front-screen is mounted on a sliding mechanism, while the main body houses the internals as well as the camera hardware.

These solutions are quite innovative, however I do think they’re impractical and sacrifice a lot (Increased weight, lesser or no IP rating, and available thickness available to the camera modules) just for the goal of having a bezel-less display.

In general I feel less certain about where 2019 will lead us in terms of solving the display bezel/notch issue. Obviously there’s all eyes on Samsung as being one of the only hold-outs for most of 2018 who have resisted in adopting any model with a notch – here the company was quite public about its plans to adopt “Infinity-V” and “Infinity-O”, the former which is a usual V-shaped notch, while the latter will be using hole-in-active-display design.

The SoC Is the Heart and Most Important Part of a Smartphone

While a few years ago, if you would have asked me what the most important part of a smartphone is, I would have said it’s the screen. In a sense, still many would agree with this today; however I find that smartphones these days have sufficiently good screens that there’s very little to improve on in terms of key characteristics and features. The AMOLED screen of a Galaxy S9 doesn’t offer all that better metrics than that of a Galaxy S6. Of course, there’s new stuff such as HDR, and the displays may have become brighter, but in the grand scheme of things these are just minor iterative improvements rather than defining experiences.

With many vendors now adopting OLED screens in their flagships, I find there’s much less of a differentiation on this aspect of a flagship smartphone. Of course, there’s still a few exceptions to this rule, such as LG notably struggling with the display power consumption of this year’s units, and of course a screen is only as good as it is calibrated.

So leaving the display as less of a major “critical” concern for most of 2018’s flagships, that leaves the SoC as the single most important component. The SoC defines what a smartphone is capable of – from the performance of the phone, to the media features to even how good the camera will perform given the SoC ISP is a key component in this regard. Most importantly alongside performance is of course power efficiency, and both are defined by the design and manufacturing of the silicon SoC.

It’s very much inarguable that 2018 was dominated by the Snapdragon 845: Qualcomm’s SoC powered essentially the vast majority of flagship smartphones, with only a few exceptions in the case of Huawei and naturally of course Apple’s iPhones. Here Qualcomm delivered one of its best SoCs to date, offering an excellent balance between performance and efficiency, all tied together with excellent software driving the hardware. This essentially guaranteed that almost any Snapdragon 845 phone will be an outstanding performer, all while delivering great battery life.

Silicon design is hard and also an expensive billion dollar venture – this is why most vendors rely on commodity components from Qualcomm. On the other side of the spectrum, we have Huawei and Apple as the only two fully vertically integrated vendors, who are also able to design their own silicon. It’s a risky business, however it can also pay off plenty when executed correctly.

An example of this paying off when executed well, is this year’s Kirin 980 as well as Apple’s A12. The new 7nm chips provided new levels of performance and efficiency, augmenting the products beyond that what can be offered by the competition. Both companies’ chipsets, as well as Qualcomm’s, have showcased fantastic improvements in terms of power efficiency.

Apple’s A12 this year especially was able to outshine the competition as we’ve now seen outstanding improvements in performance.  This year’s performance jump in particular was significant for Apple – showcasing SPECint2006 speed base scores 15% higher than AMD’s Ryzen 2700X, while also not being very far away from Intel’s best desktop CPUs. We’ll be revisiting this performance comparison in the following months in more detail.

While we had some exemplary showcases on one side, on the other hand Samsung’s Exynos 9810 this year was quite a blunder. The chip initially had great promises, with the first “super-wide” core microarchitecture in an Android SoC. In practice however the SoC had massive issues both in terms of software, as well as just lacking the hardware power efficiency to be able to compete. This was felt no better than in Samsung’s own products: The Galaxy S9’s as well as the Note9’s differ in their SoC internals depending on the market. In practice, while the Snapdragon and Exynos variants very much look the same, they feel like very different devices as the latter has a significant performance and efficiency disadvantage.

2018’s Continued Headphone Jack Removal: Piling on the Stupid and Anti-Consumer Behaviour

2018 has continued to see a lot of companies remove the 3.5mm headphone jack from their smartphones. I’ve never really thought this was a good idea, as to me the reasonings that the companies gave just didn’t make any sense to me. Audio inherently is analog, and moving the internal audio DAC (which was fairly high quality) from being inside the phone to a lower quality DAC being just outside the phone on the connector is one of those things that still boggles my mind till today.

Much of the argumentation in favour of its removal was somehow increased internal space for other components. This seemed a far-fetched marketing argument that just didn’t hold up in practice, as essentially no vendor besides Apple (with the bigger taptic engine) has done anything of substance with the space.

OnePlus 6 - Credit JerryRigEverything

OnePlus 6T - Credit JerryRigEverything

The recent OnePlus 6T is the most abhorrent example of this as its headphone jack removal has done nothing to change the internal component dimensions on the bottom of the phone, and in place where the jack would be, we find… a slightly shifted vibration motor, and nothing else. This very much looks to be a calculated business move rather than a decision based on any kind of technical merits.

What really does boil my blood though isn’t just the argumentation that it saves on internal space, but that it somehow improves audio quality. Unfortunately this is again just a bad misconception that over the last year or two has now reached absurd levels. The one true technical benefit of having the DAC tightly coupled with a pair of headphones, is that you can tune the DAC to the precise frequency response of the drivers of those headphones, because well, it will never power anything else.

In particular this year’s two most prominent USB-C audio devices, Google’s Pixel USB-C earbuds as well as OnePlus’ Type-C Bullets fail at this exact promise: Google’s units in my experience just have abysmal audio, and you can do nothing about it as the phone offers absolutely no way to tune the audio output. If you plug the headphones in any other device, most of the time you’re also out of luck as most device’s audio equalisation options rely on hardware acceleration via the built-in DAC – but because USB-C audio is just digital pass-through, you’d have to resort to third-party software than pre-processes things on the CPU at increased battery drain.

Again as an example, OnePlus' marketing is very questionable in regard: On their webpage we see the quote:

“Better Audio with a Built-in DAC. We’ve crafted a listening experience that’s immersive, vibrant, and extraordinarily detailed, thanks to an advanced internal DAC with high-res audio support.”

Based on this you would expect the Type-C bullets to offer fantastic sound out-of-the box, yet there’s a hiccup: While the units do sound much better than Google’s, they’re still a far cry from optimal. In the OnePlus 6T’s audio settings we find a “Sound enhancement” option, and here we see OnePlus here provide equalisation presets for a set of popular headphones, among which is their new Type-C bullets. Enabling this option gives a much more optimal frequency response which does notably improve the audio experience.

OnePlus 6T Sound Enhancements

Now the question here for me is: Why is this a software option on the phone rather something pre-baked into the Type-C Bullet’s DAC out of the factory? Do I also need to mention that in order to use the Type-C headphones on previous OnePlus devices you need to enable OTG in the settings (Which automatically turns off after 10 minutes), and even with this enabled, the OnePlus 6 currently doesn’t even actually offer the equalisation features of the 6T, as it’s only enabled for 3.5mm connected headphones.

3.5mm dongles have also been a complete disaster in the Android ecosystem: To date most smartphones relied on relatively high quality Qualcomm or Wolfson/Cirrus Logic DACs inside the phones, with Qualcomm in particular having made some fantastic strides in audio quality with their in-house ASoCs over recent years.

The same cannot be said of the commodity USB-C to 3.5mm dongles released to date; none of these are even remotely comparable with the performance of good internal DACs, and particularly Google’s bundled units are disastrous in terms of their analog output quality. Here I have to give credit to Apple: the company still seems to be the only one being able offer a 3.5mm dongle who has competitive analog audio output with little compromises. I would not be surprised if Apple’s recently released USB-C to 3.5mm dongle to be vastly superior in audio quality compared to anything offered by Android vendors.

To add insult on top of injury – companies are now starting to advertise the lack of a headphone jack as a premium feature. We addressed the OnePlus 6T, but also Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro not having a headphone jack, while its lesser sibling, the Mate 20 having one, is again some sort of nonsensical product segmentation which seems to be designed to simply generate more accessory sales. In this case you’re paying more for a phone to have a lesser feature.

Samsung's Adapt Sound

Samsung, and partly LG, seem to be the only companies who are resisting this anti-consumer trend. Here Samsung in particular seems to have absolutely no issues in “managing its internal component space”, all while providing the best audio experience in the mobile space. It still surprises me that Samsung is still the only company to offers an actual audio calibration option via its Adapt Sound feature – a psychoacoustic feedback equalisation feature that will tune the audio output of its internal DAC to an experienced flat frequency response based on your particular headphones and your particular hearing. I vehemently urge Samsung to continue on their current path, as the competition can't seem to stop blindly shooting themselves in the foot.

Overall, 2018 has been a year of sheer stupidity when it comes to the topic of audio, 3.5mm headphone jacks, and USB-C audio. Companies will need to reconsider their strategies, and consumers who value actual good audio quality will need to vote with their wallets.

Companies’ Product Strategies and Execution in 2018

It would be far too out of scope to address every single product individually in this article, but in general the success of a given device is very much related to the overall execution of a company in this sector.

Huawei in 2018 – Success Years in the Making

I’d like to start off with Huawei in 2018. The company’s devices were the first that I’ve actually got to review at AnandTech a few years ago. Over the years we’ve extensively covered the company’s devices, and were also among one of the early publications to get to visit the company in China. There can be a lot said about the company, particularly about its current woes in the US, but to me this this is something is better addressed another time. Political aspects aside, the company wouldn’t be in this successful position today if it weren’t for its products. A few years ago when we visited the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen the company’s representatives presented a long term goal: To become the #2 smartphone vendor. 2018 was the year that this goal became reality, as Huawei surpassed Apple in terms of global marketshare, and most recently passed the 200 million mark of shipped smartphones for the year.

Over the years, the one thing I’ve been vocal about Huawei’s products is that with every single iteration, they have posted notable improvements in many aspects of its products. I think that 2018 has been a transformative year for the company, as instead of being just a follower, in many aspects is has started to become a leader. The company is the only Android vendor who is vertically integrated with its silicon – featuring its own in-house HiSilicon designed Kirin chipsets. As I’ve addressed on the previous page, this can be a double-edged sword if the execution isn’t perfect. The first half of 2018 was a good example of the potential negative side of this strategy, as the Kirin 970 largely lagged behind the competition in terms of performance and power efficiency.

Still, even though the phones came with an inherent hardware disadvantage, they still saw great success because of the strides the company made in other aspects of the phones. In particular on the camera side of things, the P20 Pro will be remembered as a pioneer device, sporting a camera configuration not seen before in any other smartphone, and raising the bar in terms of photography, especially essentially leading the market in terms of low-light computational photography.

The second half of the year, with the release of the Kirin 980, the company finally had a really competitive engine to put into its chassis. The Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro have really been massive steps up for Huawei in terms of hardware design, and are by far the best products the company ever made. The phones are not perfect – here Huawei still has to iterate on some aspects, especially when it comes to detail and giving a more polished experience. The Mate 20 Pro comes at a quite premium price – and at this level I would have expected no compromises. Unfortunately Huawei’s choice of going with non-Samsung OLED screen was risky, and unfortunately there’s some quality concerns with units which come with an LG provided panel. I’ve addressed the 3.5mm headphone jack situation on the previous page, and here I find it regrettable that Huawei fell prey to this market tendency. On the software side of things, it’s also arguable that Huawei still has some ways to go to be able to offer a more streamlined and consistent experience.

While Huawei’s 2018 devices aren’t perfect, they are inarguably a step up from its 2017 predecessors, and again I see Huawei as the company with the best potential for the future.

LG in 2018 – The Biggest Disappointment

If I were to name one device in 2018 as the biggest disappointment, then it’s the LG G7. This was meant to be a major jump for the company and present itself as the alternative to Samsung’s Galaxy S9 this year. Unfortunately I do not know what happened within the company this year, as the end products this year’s phones just had notable deal-breaking flaws.

On the camera side, the G7 was a straight downgrade from last year’s LG V30. For whatever inexplicable reason, LG’s image processing this year was just terrible, with washed out or unnatural colours and blurred out details. I’ve given the company the benefit of the doubt as this could be fixed via software, but even 5 months after release with the latest firmware, the situation hasn’t improved. The LG V40 is slightly better, but also showcases the same blurred out detail issues.

What has been of particular issue this year has been LG’s own display panels: The G7’s screen was promised to be very efficient, and this this true at high brightness levels, it came with a very high base power consumption that largely negated this benefit in daily scenarios. The LG V40 is even worse in this regard – sporting one of the highest base power consumption levels I’ve seen in a smartphone over the last 5 or so years. The end result is that the V40 ends up among one of the worst battery life performances this year. Here I think there’s something that’s fundamentally broken on the hardware side, and for some reason this display panel flaw seems to have permeated (To a lesser severity) to other vendor’s devices which use LG screens, most notably the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and the small Pixel 3.

Both the G7 and V40 are devices which should not have been released in their respective states, and the fact that they were points out to QA issues at LG’s hardware teams.

Google in 2018 – Great Cameras – Average Hardware

Google’s biggest positives in 2018 has been the Pixel 3’s new camera, and in particular their adoption of low-light computational photography. While day-light shots haven’t seen any major differences to the Pixel 2, it’s still a relatively good performer – although I do find that the phones not always win out against the competition from Apple, Samsung or OnePlus. Low-light performance on the other hand has been a fantastic experience, and Google’s new Night Sight mode is something to be experienced.

While Google’s software experience is straightforward and simple, it also lacks sometimes in features. Off the top off my head now since we discussed it in the earlier page, things like having any kind of audio play back customisation options is something that’s been around for years on other vendors. Android Pie’s gesture controls are also one of those things Google puts out that make very little sense. The Pixel 3 offers no alternatives to the new pill gesture control, a navigation method that in my opinion serves absolutely no purpose or benefits over the traditional navigation buttons. Every other Android vendor’s custom gesture implementation is superior to Google’s, and at least I’m thankful that the new navigation method is not something that is imposed on other vendors.

The Pixel 3’s biggest lacking however is its hardware. I was a tad disappointed by the build quality of the phone, as the back glass felt flimsy and not as solid as alternatives from the competition. Other hardware flaws include the new speakers which easily distort audio, even though the company promised a focus on speaker experience. While I can’t comment on the Pixel 3 XL, the Pixel 3 also seemingly has worse battery life than the Pixel 2, seemingly because of Google’s choice going with an LG display panel. Speaking of the Pixel 3 XL – Google’s design choice this year with the humongous display notch has been a big miss. The fact that Google avoided showing this aspect of the phone even once during its announcement event points out to a certain level of self-awareness in this regard.

OnePlus in 2018 – Among the Best of 2018 – While Settling on the 6T

The OnePlus 6 has been among one of my favourite devices of 2018. Again, it’s not a perfect device as the phone maybe lacked in some aspects such as its speaker quality. But overall, the OnePlus 6 has been one of the best-rounded packages this year offering excellent value. OnePlus’ execution here was great, and particularly I was impressed by the phone’s daylight camera performance, showing HDR processing very much competing at the very highest end, punching far above its weight in terms of price category.

The OnePlus 6T for me is a bit more controversial, just because it is an iterative generation over the OnePlus 6. The removal of the headphone jack for me is again as addressed in the previous page a big negative, because OnePlus did it for no technical merit, and in a way that doesn’t benefit the end consumer at all.

Still, OnePlus’s execution this year I would say closely follows the KISS principle (Keep-it-stupid-simple). Very robust hardware with great build quality, simple yet performant and streamlined software experience, at a very competitive price.

Apple in 2018 – Perfect Execution, High Prices

This year’s iPhone XS and XS Max in many aspects have been just iterative devices for Apple. Yet this is what Apple does the best, and everything that’s new about 2018’s phones is executed to perfection. The new cameras on the iPhone XSs are straightforward and fantastic upgrades, majorly improving performance and quality. Apple’s low-light performance isn’t quite as innovative as what we’ve seen from the Android devices this year, and if there’s anything that I would say the new iPhones are lacking in, then it would be this.

Apple’s new A12 SoC is just an outstanding piece of silicon, achieving new heights in performance in mobile. Apple’s silicon design teams are clearly at the forefront here – and their execution over the last couple of years feels seemingly unstoppable.

Finally, the real only aspect I can criticise Apple on is their pricing. The new iPhones come at a significant price premium, and Apple is especially putting a heavy price premium on higher tier storage models that I feel is exceedingly hard to rationalise. I’m not sure how this will play out for Apple in terms of sales and overall profit, but I do feel that it has the potential to shift more users to Android alternatives, as even the new “budget” iPhone XR is comes at price points exceeding that of many other competing flagships.

Samsung in 2018 – Flagship Devices in Two Different Variants

My thoughts on Samsung’s 2018 performance is two-fold. On one hand, the Galaxy S9, S9+ and Note9 have been outstanding devices that essentially are the real no-compromise devices of 2018. Samsung has resisted knee-jerk product design decisions such as display notches, removal of headphone jacks, and instead focused on improving the essential aspects of its devices, improving on the excellent base that was established by the Galaxy S8 and Note8 in 2017.

I feel that Samsung has a sufficient level of inertia and critical mass within its design teams that it would be very hard for the company to come out with a product that wouldn’t be successful, however this also means that more often than not the company will chose to play it more safely. For 2018, playing it safe was undoubtedly the wisest choice one could make, as Samsung’s phones, on all aspects that define it as a Samsung phone, have been great successes.

That being said, not every Galaxy S9 or Note9 is the same, and Samsung’s biggest failure this year has been in the heart of the phone: the SoC. If all of Samsung’s devices this year would have been powered by the Snapdragon 845, I would have had no issues to declaring the Galaxy S9 and Note9 the best Android phones of the year (And this might be very valid for the markets who get these variants). However the Exynos 9810’s variant’s handicaps this year has soured the conclusion for Samsung’s phones, as models with this variant of the chipset are just objectively worse phones.

In the past, the dual-sourcing strategy has paid off in terms of risk management, particularly on the Galaxy S6, Samsung was largely able to avoid the troubles of the Snapdragon 810 by exclusively using its own in-house silicon globally that year. However by now we’ve seen that S.LSI’s execution is not always superior, and the last few generations of Exynos SoCs have been lacklustre compared to Snapdragon options.

Samsung’s mobile division here needs to make a choice as to what it wants to do, because essentially right now we have the worst of both worlds. A good analogy is that even given an incredible amount of resources, if you have to spread the work across two platforms, each will only get half the amount of effort put in. S.LSI over the last few years has failed to get any meaningful design wins besides their own sister division, and it largely looks that they’re going nowhere in terms of actually achieving more success in this regard, even with something as simple as achieving 100% of the sockets of Samsung’s own Galaxy flagship devices. It looks to be likely that the new S10 will again come with a variant with the Exynos 9820 and another with the Snapdragon 855. The fact that the latter is manufactured on TSMC 7nm and will be going into Samsung’s own product should be quite an embarrassment to the conglomerate’s own foundry business.

This conflict between the chipset division and the mobile division worries me as to the future competitiveness of the mobile division’s products, because if it doesn’t go all-in in one way or the other, the products will always suffer similar segmentation and discrepancy as we’ve seen in 2018. Also, Apple and Huawei have proven the benefits of full vertical integration. Apple now holds a considerable lead in its SoC performance, and if Huawei will continue to improve and execute correctly, if it doesn’t already today, it will in the future represent a considerable threat to Samsung’s overall business.

Related Reading

• The iPhone XS & XS Max Review: Unveiling the Silicon Secrets
• The Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ Review: Exynos and Snapdragon at 960fps
• Improving The Exynos 9810 Galaxy S9: Part 2 - Catching Up With The Snapdragon
• Samsung Galaxy Note9 Performance & Battery Showdown: Snapdragon vs Exynos
• The LG G7 Review: A Rushed Attempt?
• The OnePlus 6 Review: Among The Best Of 2018
• The Huawei P20 & P20 Pro Review: Great Battery Life & Even Better Night Vision
• The Mate 20 & Mate 20 Pro Review: Kirin 980 Powering Two Contrasting Devices
• The Google Pixel 3 Review: The Ultimate Camera Test