Samsung Galaxy S8, iPhone 8 & Return Of Nokia: The Tech Upgrades To Expect In 2017

Nokia returns

Nokia was once a giant of the mobile phone industry, but the advent of the smartphone and its offloading of the Lumia division to Microsoft saw the Finish company eventually pushed out of the arena by the likes of Apple, Samsung and HTC.

Like the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes, this year is going to see the return of Nokia to the handset game. The Nokia 6 smartphone will launch under the HMD subsidiary brand in China as part of this second coming.

Sporting an eight—core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 chip, 4GB of RAM, and 65GB of storage, the Nokia 6 is presenting a solid Android 7.0 Nougat smartphone. Stiff competition in the Chinese market will not make it easy for Nokia to return to its former glory, but then people do like an underdog story.

Microsoft Surface Phone

The Windows 10 Mobile platform and smartphones has not been a resounding success for Apple, with many businesses and consumers preferring Android and iOS alternatives. With the rumoured Surface Phone, Microsoft could tap into its more successful hardware brand and have another bite at the cherry in an attempt to captivate the mobile market.

Microsoft is due to kill off the Lumia brand that it acquired from Nokia and that’ll leave a gap for the so-called Surface Phone.

There are few details on the specification, design or concrete existence of such a phone under development, but we would place our bets on it being aimed squarely at Microsoft Office and Windows 10 users, linking the ecosystems of each together with a heavily re-worked Windows 10 Mobile operating system.

While it will no doubt make a nod towards supporting Xbox and other gaming services and apps from Microsoft’s more consumer orientated divisions, we can predict that the Surface Phone will be aimed at productivity on the go, synching up with other Surface products and making heavy use of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and data analytics services.

There is also a strong change the Redmond company will create a form of hardware and software interface, as an evolution of its Continuum peripheral, to dock that allows the Surface Phone to be used as a pocketable desktop PC as well as a capable smartphone.

Intel Cannonlake 10nm chips

Intel is consistently squeezing more transistors onto the same space of square silicon in its mobile and desktops CPU chips, thus chasing the legacy of Moore’s Law. It’s 10 nanometre (nm) process was scheduled for release last year, but this ended up being delayed with the 14nm Kaby Lake 7^th generation Core i CPUs filling the gap.

But 10nm CPUs are on their way with the Cannonlake microarchitecture set to make its debut this year, ushering in the 8^th generation of the longstanding Core i CPU series, but hopefully bringing in more power and even more efficiency to the CPUs and potentially better performing on-board graphics chips that should please power users and office workers alike.

And that’s not all of the product upgrades we are set to see in 2017; there’s plenty more to come, and with the rise of smart devices an the Internet of Things (IoT), we are set to see all manner of ways re-worked tech can find its way into products, platforms and service across all manner of industries. 

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