What mobile phone can be popular and popular?
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Shenrancaijing” (ID: shenrancaijing), author Jin Junpi, editor Wei Jia. Released with authorization.
How often do you change a cell phone? What is the replacement power?
Have you ever thought about the fact that mobile phone manufacturers have already helped us calculate the time.
We use mobile phones every day, the most intuitive experience is the screen, shooting, system, battery life these points, in fact, the precise knife methods of mobile phone manufacturers basically cut these aspects. Data shows that consumer replacement cycles are extending, with an average replacement cycle exceeding 33 months.
“In order to get consumers to pay for mobile phones, manufacturers will always increase some selling points, even if some features are not in strong demand.” An industry insider told Shenran.
After experiencing such an extraordinary mobile phone market in 2020, the ups and downs have been vividly manifested within a year, and now we have to usher in an unpredictable 2021. The arms race of mobile phone manufacturers has developed to this day, and the hardware differences have been very small, especially for flagship products. It can be said that the stack has reached the best technology for energy production in the current supply chain. In terms of software, the four major domestic mobile phone manufacturers have It is difficult to make up the gap.
So, what should mobile phone manufacturers fight for in 2021?
Will a hundred flowers bloom in the form of the mobile phone screen? According to a recent survey conducted by the foreign media GSMArena on the “Smart Phone Features You Most Expect in 2021”, the under-screen camera technology ranks first. Some people in the industry believe that the under-screen camera is a technology that every mobile phone manufacturer is motivated to overcome. However, whether the technology is mature or not in 2021, it is difficult to make a conclusion and be pessimistic to judge. Even if the first-generation products come out, there will be some experience. sacrifice.
Which cell phone is the most anticipated? Will you change planes in 2021? This article will analyze the four core points of the current flagship mobile phone competition, screen effects, imaging system, chip performance and charging efficiency.
Is there a new story on the under-screen camera?
According to data from the iResearch UserTracker platform: In the first half of 2020, short video applications accounted for nearly 32% of the single-machine single-day effective time of consumer apps commonly used, and it has become one of the most commonly used mobile apps by residents. Before each mobile phone is released, what screen the manufacturer will use is one of the focuses of consumers’ attention.
Remember the mobile phones we used before?
The screen is embedded in the middle of the phone, and there are more or less “forehead” and “chin” on both ends. At that time, the full screen was far away from us, but with the advancement of technology and the efforts of mobile phone manufacturers, the screen gradually tended to be full screen. At this time, the front camera became abrupt.
The mainstream solution on the market this yearThe case is still notch and hole-digging screen, which can be said to be the optimal solution in the intermediate state. And manufacturers know that full-screen mobile phones with under-screen cameras (that is, the front camera and all sensors are hidden directly under the screen and are not visible from the outside to achieve a true full screen) are currently the biggest hot spots. Why not release mass production Machine, will this technology have a new story next year?
Previously, mobile phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo have all released concept models of mobile phones with under-screen camera technology, but none of them are mass-produced. Xu Yan, the evaluation manager of a mobile phone manufacturer, told Shenran that how to get light through the screen to reach the camera is the core of the under-screen camera technology. Now the industry has two solutions in parallel, but from the current evolution, there are technologies that have not yet been overcome. The problem may not be overcome in 2021. In short, it is still difficult to popularize under-screen cameras.
One solution is to reduce the pixel density of the area under the screen to allow more light-transmitting area, but the disadvantage is that because the resolution of the area under the screen is lower, a significant screen window effect will appear. Another solution is to keep the pixel density unchanged, but reduce the area of each pixel, you can also make the area that can transmit light more, but the problem is that because it reduces the area of a single pixel, you want to ensure the screen If the brightness of the light is the same, the area under the screen needs more current to compensate for the dark area caused by the smaller pixels. Then the aging of the pixels will be very serious. The life of the area under the screen and other areas is different. Long, you will find that the area under the screen will change color, possibly yellow, black, or gray.
Of course, this does not completely hinder the pace of commercialization by manufacturers. Not long ago, ZTE released the first mobile phone AXON 20 Extreme Edition equipped with an under-screen camera.
Xu Yan said that this is an experimental product that ZTE sees market acceptance, and the plan itself is not very mature. According to Lin Zhi, chief analyst of Wit Display, the yield rate of this technology is unstable and the production capacity is not guaranteed. Except for small factories like ZTE, no large manufacturer has launched mass production machines under the screen, which is enough to show that the maturity of the technology is not enough. high.
Next year, mobile phone manufacturers will continue to work hard on the screen form.
On the one hand, continue to conquer hard screens, redouble our efforts on waterfall screens, surround screens, and folding screens, and even continue to extend curved screens, such as four curved surfaces, that is, the upper and lower sides are also curved.
The folding screen is already a relatively mature solution. Under the leadership of Samsung, the domestic manufacturers’ radical technology research and development and promotion in the past two years have reached a stable commercial state. Xu Yan observed from the current supply chain that by the end of next year, leading manufacturers will launch folding screen products.
Samsung folding screen phone Source / Samsung official website
In this regard, Huawei is more radical among domestic manufacturers. Folding screens have been mass-produced in small batches, and waterfall screens have been mass-produced. By the second generation, four-curved screens have also been used in flagship phones.
But on the other hand, after working hard, manufacturers also found that consumers’ feedback on curved screens was not as positive as they had imagined. The cost is too high and it detracts from the performance of the whole machine. It may be mass-produced, and it won’t even become mainstream within a few years, and manufacturers will return to face-to-face screen designs.
“Manufacturers will keep curved screens in some product lines, because they look tall and can attract offline users to buy.” Xu Yan said.
More than one person in the industry believes that next, mobile phone manufacturers will focus more on the display effect of the screen.
In terms of display effects, the most radical may be OPPO, which is willing to pay for the latest screen display technology and will introduce Samsung’s top screen next year. However, Apple’s mobile phone screens represent the changes in the entire mobile phone industry. Recently, it was reported that BOE’s OLED screens entered Apple’s supply chain and began to supply OLED panels to the iPhone 12. “BOE’s production capacity should not be underestimated. If BOE can reduce the price of OLED screens, we can look forward to using OLED screens in thousand yuan phones.” Wang Chao, founder of Wenyuan Think Tank, told Shenran.
In addition to the continued evolution of basic parameters such as color accuracy, saturation, and brightness, the high refresh rate of the screen has also become the focus of the game of every mobile phone manufacturer in the past two years. Now the refresh rate of 90Hz is considered normal. Some manufacturers have already released a refresh rate of 144Hz. Will the refresh rate of mobile phones get higher and higher next year? Although flagship mobile phones are equipped with high-swivels as standard, Xu Yan believes that the refresh rate is high to a certain extent, and the user’s perception in this regard is limited, and manufacturers continue to invest in cost-effective.
And what he is really optimistic about is the current efforts of manufacturers on low-power screens.
Regardless of whether the screen of the mobile phone is larger, higher, or higher, it consumes more and more power in the evolution. From the perspective of the technological planning route of Samsung, the screen leader, maintain the existing display effect and parameter experience At the same time, reducing power consumption is a general direction for mobile phone screens. The power consumption is determined by two points. One is to optimize the luminescent material of the screen on the hardware. The other is that the support of multiple refresh rates, extremely low gears, and dynamic refresh rate can all reduce the power consumption of the screen.
Computational photography becomes a battlefield
In addition to “where to put the front”, the competition among manufacturers in the camera aspect is also “the rear pinduoduo”. In HuaweiDriven by this, mobile phone manufacturers have all joined the arms race of the imaging system, fighting for quantity and parameters.
After Xiaomi and Samsung’s flagship mobile phones used 100 million pixel cameras, the mobile phone pixel battle has reached its limit. Xu Yan said that although the spelling parameters have not stopped, it has come to an end, because by 2021, 48 million pixels will basically be the standard configuration of the Android flagship machine.
Mobile phone space is limited, the number of cameras that can be plugged is limited, and the camera parameters are also limited, and when the parameters become standard, what else can manufacturers fight for?
Mobile phones cannot go the way of professional cameras. Professional cameras are designed around imaging systems. Mobile phones need to be balanced to improve the image as much as possible under the constraints of size, performance, power consumption, etc. System performance.
The “2020 White Paper on China’s Artificial Intelligence Mobile Phones” (hereinafter referred to as the white paper) shows that light perception systems account for nearly 50% of the value of key components of smart phones, which is an incremental factor that breaks the bottleneck of the mobile phone market. The light perception system includes camera components such as lenses, modules, sensors, and voice coil motors, as well as chips, ISPs, screens, and other parts for calculation and display.
Source / Pexels
Another very important point is that the under-screen camera is what manufacturers will fight for next year. In addition to working hard on the side of the screen, how to shoot photos and videos with no degradation in quality across a layer of screen is a more essential challenge. The difficulty of off-screen shooting is that the screen must be used for display and imaging. In traditional rear and front shooting, light enters the lens without hindrance (only air), but when shooting under the screen, the light must pass through the screen first. In addition to the reduced luminous flux and the lack of image information, this process will also bring about fogging, light spots, etc. problem.
The artificial intelligence company Megvii Technology has also considered this problem and proposed the idea of ”redefining the light perception system with AI”. The core is to upgrade the three major systems of light (optical), sense (sensing), and knowledge (computing) from the original parameter-level interaction to a fully connected structure similar to a neural network, thereby achieving overall optimization and complementing each other.
Take under-screen shooting as an example. In the screen design, diffractive optics and pixel arrangement are considered to improve light transmittance and optimize spot diffusion. AI algorithms such as computational photography are introduced in the sensor imaging process, and AI is used to compensate for multiple Exposure design to enhance the basic image quality. Use the light perception system to be globally optimalIn the end, it will cooperate with the screen to eliminate the negative influence of light, and even become a positive enhancement. This may be the direction of the future mobile phone screen imaging system.
Back to the current mobile phone imaging system, AI algorithms have already played an important role. The white paper shows that in 2019, the coverage rate of AI shooting algorithms in Android phones at different prices in China reached 91.6%. Among them, the value of AI basic image quality algorithms accounted for the highest proportion, exceeding 50%. Mobile phone manufacturers either develop their own algorithms or cooperate with AI companies.
According to Xu Yan, manufacturers will make differentiated strategies based on products at different price points. For example, the imaging capabilities of flagship phones need to be strong and controllable, so the proportion of self-research will be high, but they will also purchase algorithms from third parties . Because the third-party algorithms are very rich, there is no conflict between the algorithms, and they can be superimposed.
Take Megvii’s super image quality technology as an example. It has been iterated to version 3.0 and provides more than 100 functions, such as image quality enhancement, AI noise reduction, high dynamic range HDR, ghosting optimization and so on. The white paper mentions that 10 of the top 15 mobile phones in the DXO mobile phone shooting evaluation are domestic mobile phones, and more than 70% of them have applied or developed basic image quality algorithms in cooperation with Megvii.
This year is the year when computing photography is fully popularized. Next year, mobile phone manufacturers will continue to strengthen and add more new tricks. With the more algorithms for calculating photography, the more superimposed, the greater the amount of calculation required, and there is no need to worry about these algorithms running on the phone. On the one hand, the algorithm will be jointly designed with the chip to optimize power consumption during the development process. On the other hand, Xu Yan said that now there is 5G blessing, which can put the calculation of the algorithm in the cloud, complete the processing in the cloud, and then feed the original film back to the mobile phone to reduce the power consumption of the mobile phone.
Short videos have become popular this year, and photography and video, especially moving images, will continue to be a battleground for mobile phone manufacturers in 2021. According to the judge of the senior product manager, the Sensor-Shift technology adopted by the high-end version of the iPhone 12 series will be the next breakthrough direction. This is a more powerful photo stabilization technology that replaces OIS optical image stabilization.
Quick charge will not fall out of favor
Bigger screens, stronger algorithms, more functions, and a series of killer applications such as mobile VR/AR applications, 8K videos, and cloud games brought by 5G mobile phones are rapidly consuming mobile phones. Power, fast charging, is absolutely just needed.
In 2020, the flagship phones of domestic mobile phone manufacturers have made great efforts in fast charging, achieving 55W and 65W everywhere, and some even entered the era of 100W fast charging. The following manufacturers are already on the way, but besides the superposition of wattage, are there any other players in the fast charging field?
Fast charge 60W, the user can fully charge in half an hour, fast charge 120W, the phone can be fully charged in as fast as 15 minutes, shortening 15 minutes and improving50%, but the investment of the manufacturer may be doubled or tripled, which is not cost-effective for the manufacturer and the user, and the marginal effect is diminishing. From this perspective, Xu Yan judges that manufacturers will not invest too much in wired fast charging in the future. There is a high probability that they will choose a relatively cost-effective solution such as 55W and 56W. Perhaps the “super big cup” will achieve 120W.
Another investment direction is wireless fast charging. “After manufacturers have achieved 50 or 60 watts of wired, and then achieved this level of wireless, it is very competitive.” He said.
At the top of the pyramid of 120W wired fast charging, Xiaomi and vivo seem to be direct competitors, and both have released commercial grade products with fast charging 120W, but OPPO is not in a hurry, nor is it eager to release a machine. “Because OPPO is studying the performance and user experience of charging-related components, such as heat generation and battery life.” According to Xu Yan, what is the difference between OPPO’s 120W and Xiaomi’s 120W? It may be that the fever is smaller.
Fast charging and power-saving optimization has always been a problem in the mobile phone industry. Until today, the iPhone’s fast charging technology has remained at 18W a few years ago, and domestic mobile phone manufacturers have always been in the forefront. The overall supply chain technology of fast charging is also Driven by Chinese mobile phone manufacturers.
Among domestic manufacturers, Huawei tends to be conservative in fast charging. Xu Yan described that in Huawei’s plan, the investment in fast charging is sufficient, and it also reflects the trade-offs to a certain extent. “For Huawei, imaging is the first priority. The investment in this part is much higher than other manufacturers, but it does not have the brand premium of Apple, and the price cannot be much higher than its rivals, so it needs to do some other aspects. Choose.”
Actually, fast charging has become the housekeeping skill of some domestic mobile phone manufacturers. Wang Chao believes that next year mobile phone manufacturers will still fight for fast charging, but in addition to the increase in wattage, there are also protocol updates. It is more important to expand more charging scenarios and charging methods.
Continue to grab the core
The situation in the 3G era is that people have switched to 3G packages, but mobile phones can’t keep up. Now it’s the other way around. Mobile phone manufacturers are already holding 5G mobile phones and ready to go far ahead of operators.
Although many users have switched to 5G mobile phones, not many people actually use 5G packages, “about 30%”, but next year, manufacturers will release new phones and 5G will still be standard. “5G is still the main consideration for the replacement crowd. Users generally like to chase new ones, especially offline users.” Xu Yan said.
This year, the price of 5G mobile phones will be further dropped, reaching a thousand yuan level, which can balance the excessively high 5G package tariffs to a certain extent. He predicts that with the maturity of domestic Ziguang Zhanrui chips, domestic mobile phone manufacturers may sell 699 in 2021 , 799 yuan 5G mobile phone.
Grabbing 5G chips is the first step to grab the high-end mobile phone market. “There are only three companies capable of making 5G chips,” the judge said.
Xu Yan told Shen Ran that in 2021, the flagship machine on the Android platform will most likely be Qualcomm’s world; Samsung’s 5G chips are not used by head manufacturers, only vivo cooperates closely with it, and generally used On the off-line models; MediaTek mainly appeared on mid-range models; while HiSilicon has a lot of uncertainty.
Source / Pexels
This year’s flagship models mostly use Qualcomm Snapdragon 865. It can be determined that next year’s most popular product is Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor. On December 1, Qualcomm released this processor. Many domestic mobile phone manufacturers announced for the first time that they would launch mobile phones equipped with it soon. However, Xiaomi’s term is “first release”, that is, Xiaomi 11 released on December 28. Many other manufacturers use the term “first batch.” Lu Weibing, president of Xiaomi China, specifically emphasized that there is a gap between the first batch and the first batch. After Xiaomi 11, OPPO, vivo, Honor, Samsung, ZTE, etc. will be equipped with Snapdragon 888.
Vendors are treated differently, depending on the timing and investment of cooperation with Qualcomm. Xu Yan revealed that Xiaomi has arranged many engineers to participate in the pre-design of Snapdragon 888, and some manufacturers are just a purchasing customer.
Samsung is the No. 2 seed favored by mobile phone manufacturers. The Samsung Exynos 1080 chip is jointly developed with vivo, and the new phone from vivo will also be the first to be released. Another media report said that next year Samsung plans to supply its Exynos chips to other Chinese mobile phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi and OPPO.
The judge got news from the upstream that several RF baseband chip sets (RF baseband+transiver), including MediaTek, are out of stock recently. Everyone feels that 20-30% of the market space released by Huawei is their own. The supply chain was hoarding stocks like crazy, hoarding production capacity for several quarters, but if the mobile phone market is insufficient next year, the supply of these chips will be in excess. These stockedThe set of chips will flow to the market in one to two quarters, and some mid-range chips may fall on low-end phones. The high inventory of chips will cause the price of mobile phones to drop further.
Snapdragon 888 is the standard configuration of the Android flagship machine in 2021. Wang Chao analyzed, “If a manufacturer can lower the price of a mobile phone equipped with Snapdragon 888 to less than 3,000 yuan, it will sell well, but now Xiaomi dare not do such a thing.”
At the same time, he told Shenran, “If there is an accident with Huawei P40E, then Mi 11 may be the most watched mobile phone in the first half of next year.”