The best smartphones still to come in 2017

So impressive and awaiting of the upcoming smartphones to be launch this year, expecting big name smartphones will be launch before the end of 2017. We’ve seen some impressive flagship phones hit the market already this year, including handsets from LG, Samsung, and HTC, but there’s much more to come. Here are the big-name phones we’re still expecting before the end of the year, and the stand-out features they’re likely to bring with them.

Rumor and speculation, so don’t take it as confirmed just yet. Given the number of corroborating tips that have appeared, we’re fairly confident about most of this info, and these all look like phones worth waiting for. While online leaks have become more common and more reliable in recent years, company plans can change quickly.

These are smartphones still to come in 2017, we are waiting for:

iPhone 8:

2017 will mark the 10th anniversary of the iPhone and Apple has something major planned to celebrate the occasion. We’ve got several months to go until the launch of the iPhone 8, but because of Apple’s ambitious plans for the device, there are already an abundance of rumors hinting at the impressive features coming in the 2017 iPhone.

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Apple tested more than 10 prototype iPhone models, leading to a lot of mixed rumors floating around, but the general design and the features we can expect have mostly been nailed down, including in leaks from Apple itself.

The iPhone 8 is expected to feature a radical redesign, with an edge-to-edge display that does away with the top and bottom bezels where features like the Touch ID fingerprint sensor and the front-facing camera are housed. Instead, rumors suggest Touch ID will either be built into the display or eliminated entirely in favor of facial recognition technology, with Apple is confirmed to be working on. Either way, there will be no physical Home button on the iPhone 8 and no bezels aside from a small area for the front-facing camera.

With an edge-to-edge design, the iPhone 8 may be similar in size to the 4.7-inch iPhone, but with a display the size of the 5.5-inch iPhone. Rumors suggest it will feature a 5.8-inch display with 5.15 inches of usable area, with the rest dedicated to virtual buttons that will replace the existing Home button.

The display itself is said to be a flexible plastic OLED rather than an LCD, allowing Apple to introduce a thinner device that consumes less power and offers a better display with higher contrast ratio and more true to life colors. It will feature a slightly curved 2.5D display that’s similar to the display used in the iPhone 7.

Samsung Galaxy Note 8:

Galaxy Note 8 is an upcoming smartphone by Samsung. The phone is rumoured to come with a 6.30-inch touchscreen display.

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The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is expected to be powered by 1.6GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor and come with 6GB of RAM. The phone is rumoured to pack 64GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 256GB via a microSD card. As far as the cameras are concerned, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is rumoured to pack a 12-megapixel primary camera on the rear.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 is rumoured to run Android 7.1 and be powered by a 3300mAh non removable battery.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tipped to be a dual SIM (GSM and GSM) smartphone that will accept Nano-SIM. Connectivity options are said to include Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, Headphones, 3G and 4G. Sensors on the phone are rumoured to include Proximity sensor, Accelerometer and Ambient light sensor.

The Google Pixel 2:

The Google Pixel and Pixel XL were both launched in October 2016, so we’d expect to see a Google Pixel 2 release date roughly a year later, in or around October 2017. Although the Pixel line is new, it’s building on the now defunct Nexus range, which also tended to have a new handset in around September or October of each year.

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A more recent XDA report suggests that the Pixel XL 2 will have a few more hardware goodies to look forward to, including an HTC U11-like “squeezable” frame that would launch Google Assistant whether the screen is on or off. An all-new ambient display could make the Pixel series a bit more like Moto Display, allowing users to interact with what they see of their notifications without turning the screen on — a direct benefit of having an OLED panel. And that OLED panel could allow Google to offer a true sRGB color option in its display settings, something that has until now been relegated to the little-visited (for most people) Developer Options.

Whether the new Pixels will be waterproof remains to be seen, but it would not be too off-base to assume that waterproofing would be on the table this year, given that both the HTC U11 and LG G6 are at least nominally water-resistant. Water resistance is an expectation at the high-end this year.