2017: the year smartphones went all-screen and came with baked-in AI

This year saw innovations that will set the pace for 2018, with devices acquiring bigger screens and becoming faster, more private and longer lasting

At the beginning of 2017 you could have been forgiven for thinking that smartphone innovation had died, with most phones looking the same and doing the same things, changing very little from the year before.

But by the end of 2017 two things were clear: manufacturers needed to go all-screen or go home, and artificial intelligence had finally made its way into the phone, not just feeding everything you said to a server somewhere over the horizon.