We’re halfway through 2012 and there have already been several huge smartphone releases, notably HTC’s One series and the Samsung Galaxy S3. But if none of these tickled your fancy here’s a selection of some of the big releases hitting the smartphone market over the next 6 months.
iPhone 5
Tight-lipped Apple hasn’t yet spoken about the next iPhone but that doesn’t mean we don’t have any concrete information. Numerous leaks have provided several tantalising details, including confirmation that the iPhone 5 will have a larger screen. Samples of the new casing show the screen size to be around 4-inches, while the front facing camera has been repositioned and the headphone socket has moved to the lower edge of the handset.
Controversially the connector socket looks to have been redesigned, it’s now smaller which means existing iPhone peripherals will not be compatible. Aside from that though this promises to be the biggest iPhone upgrade since the iPhone 4. A faster CPU is expected, more memory and then there’s that big screen which is almost to offer a higher resolution.
Samsung Galaxy Note 2
The original Galaxy Note was a surprise hit for Samsung, no one expected it to be anywhere near as popular as it was. Having sold over 7 million handsets they’re now gearing up to release a sequel.
The Note’s standout feature is its massive 5.3-inch display which led to it being dubbed a ‘phablet’. Rumour has it that this is increasing in size to around 5.4/5.5-inches and will be using new ‘unbreakable plane’ technology to make the phone even slimmer.
The S-Pen stylus is likely to make a return and its processing power is going to receive an upgrade. Scuttlebutt says there’ll be a quad-core CPU on a par with the Galaxy S3, and it may come with the next version of Android – Jelly Bean – out of the box.
Nokia PureView 808
Nokia had supposedly dropped the Symbian OS in its high end smartphones in favour of Windows Phone 7, so it was surprising to see the PureView 808 running Symbian at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Even more surprising to find it was a smartphone packing in an astounding 41-megapixel camera.
Early previews of this phone show the image quality is vastly superior to every other smartphone. The handset lacks an optical zoom, but because the megapixel count is so high you can take a picture, digitally zoom and crop a section of the image and still end up with a high quality photo.
The large sensor does make this bulky but its unrivalled photographic capabilities make digital compacts obsolete, it could even be the first smartphone to be suitable as a backup camera for amateur and professional photographers.
Nancy Baker
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Vitaly Kuprenko