The best and worst in tech (2017)

2017 was a fascinating year for smartphones and mobile tech in general. There were a lot of ups, a lot of downs and some pretty weird stuff along the way but there’s no denying that it was an eventful year.

Now that we’re on the cusp of the next wave of new products for 2018, we thought it’d be cool to take a look at some of the highs and some of the lows in 2017.

Let’s start with the best surprises

1. HTC U11

HTC wasn’t off to a good start in 2017. After the resounding success of their comeback HTC 10 flagship smartphone, the company thought it would be a good idea to abandon what they did best and came up with one of the most disappointing phones of 2017.

Well, I can’t say it’s disappointing because the moment I saw the U Ultra launch I knew it was going to be bad. And bad it was.

However, they redeemed themselves big time with the U11. Sure, it still featured the weird glossy-shiny-bling-bling-ring-a-ding-ding body, but I loved it. It had great performance, awesome speakers, IP67 water resistance, and one of the best smartphone cameras of the year.

Add that to the fact that it retailed at a lower price than many of the other flagships and you had a killer device. I wouldn’t call it the best phone of 2017, but it was definitely a big surprise because I expected it to suck and it totally didn’t.

It actually turned out pretty awesome.

2. Xiaomi Mi A1

I don’t think anyone could have prepared us for how good this smartphone was. I definitely did not expect Xiaomi, creators of the heavily skinned but beloved MIUI, would turn 180-degrees and launch a stock Android smartphone, spearheading the revitalised Android One program.

The Xiaomi Mi A1 was an amazing turn of events and truly one of the best marriages between hardware and software in tech.

You had the amazing value-for-money specs that the Chinese company is so well-known for, paired with the light, fluid and frequently updated goodness of stock Android. Couple that with fantastic budget price and it was as if the stars aligned when the Mi A1 was created.

3. 18:9 smartphone display aspect ratio

I don’t think I will ever forget the first time I picked one of these smartphones up. It was the LG G6 all the way back in Barcelona and for a smartphone with a high-tech 5.7-inch display, it was almost unbelievably small. Comically small, in fact.

It was such a shift from the massive bodies of something like the Nexus 6P that my jaw just hit the ground. For a moment, I thought I was holding the wrong smartphone.

The smartphone world got to a point where people wanted big screens but didn’t want super massive smartphone bodies. It was very nearly a paradox, until the new 18:9 displays came out. They were a stunning change of pace and a great way to enjoy the increasing amount of 21:9 aspect ratio YouTube videos and streaming content.

It’ll be interesting to see what manufacturers do with this newfound power in 2018.

4. NVIDIA’s Max-Q design laptops

Tech is all about cramming more into less and NVIDIA’s Max-Q design laptops are a testament to that. I love the idea of a super thin and light laptop with the crazy GPU performance of a GeForce GTX 1080.

Acer’s Predator Triton 700 was one of the few Max-Q laptops I had the chance to review and I loved a lot of it. Being able to cram that much performance into a form-factor like that is truly stunning. Now if only manufacturers could make them last longer than 2 hours on a single charge. But maybe that’s a little too much to ask.

5. DJI Spark

DJI really took the world by storm when the launched the Mavic Pro in 2016. Then, in 2017, they outdid themselves yet again with the almost shockingly small DJI Spark.

It was a tiny drone but it packed a whole lot of punch when it came to features, especially in the gesture and autonomy side of things. In fact, it was so advanced that it even had features that DJI’s more expensive offerings did not.

Couple that with a decent 1080p stabilised camera, a reasonable price tag, plus a flat learning curve and the Spark is truly the ultimate entry-level drone.

This obsession with small yet capable drones has continued to fuel the Chinese drone-maker and the result of which is the DJI Mavic Air — which pretty much seems to combine the best of the Mavic Pro and the Spark. A deadly combination if I’ve ever seen one.
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1. Xiaomi Mi MIX 2

Oh it pains me to think about the Mi MIX 2. I absolutely adored the original Mi MIX. It was the smartphone that saw convention, picked it up and threw it out the friggin’ window. It was such a show-stopper that it didn’t matter that it wasn’t a super good flagship smartphone (too big, too heavy, too slippery, poor camera, etc.). It was Xiaomi doing their own thing and succeeding so spectacularly with it that you can’t help but be impressed.

Then they launched the Mi MIX 2 and it was like they lost the plot. It felt like Xiaomi didn’t want to push the envelope anymore, they wanted to make money. So the resulting device looked less impressive, was more “practical” and was probably a better run-of-the-mill smartphone. Even its bezels were thicker than the original.

Once you lose that controlled madness, the handset’s flaws become all the more obvious. Its camera is weak, selfie shooter is in a poor spot, software isn’t super great, battery life was fairly average and it didn’t have creature comforts like IP68 water resistance or a headphone jack.

And Xiaomi already makes a killer practical flagship smartphone with most of the bells and whistles at a fraction of the price of its competitors. It’s called the Mi 6 and if you’re looking for a practical handset, this should be the one you get.

I loved the Mi MIX because it was a concept phone. It could have– should have been a line of devices that that didn’t have to worry about fitting into a mould or push numbers. Xiaomi’s other handsets could do that. The MIX name should have been one that was synonymous to the madness of engineering brilliance.

But I felt that the MIX 2 cut the legs out from under it before it could even settle into a pace.

2. ASUS ZenFone AR

Honestly, I can’t really blame ASUS much for this. I felt that it was more of a Project Tango fail than anything else. We thought that AR needed all of this fancy tech. That it needed three cameras and a whole bunch of crazy hardware to make it work well.

And ASUS delivered on that with their powerhouse ZenFone AR. But when I used it, supported apps that were actually cool or useful were few and far between. Most of them were pretty clunky and didn’t really work beyond being a cool party trick.

Then Apple came along with ARKit and suddenly all the conventional wisdom surrounding AR was thrown out the window. Even your old iPad could run AR programs as well as the RM3,799 ZenFone AR.

Then Google killed off Project Tango and the ZenFone AR became just an expensive flagship that wasn’t as well-built as its rivals nor was it as desirable.

3. Nokia 8

I know I’m going to get a lot of flak from Nokia fans for this, but I stand by my judgement that the Nokia 8 was a massive disappointment. Partly because it couldn’t live up to the hype (but honestly, no device would have been able to) of being this big comeback flagship smartphone from one of the most recognisable names in the mobile handset market.

But mostly, I was just unimpressed with the smartphone as a whole — especially that appalling camera and its UI.

That said, being a disappointment also has its silver lining because now I can manage my expectations going into future Nokia handsets. It was a tough wake up call but I think it’s time we accept that this Nokia is nowhere near the Nokia of old.

4. Dual cameras

What started out as a big feature everyone was excited about from 2016 quickly turned into a huge disappointment because the fact was that nobody really knew what to do with the dual camera system. Monochrome and RGB? Wide and standard? Zoom and standard? Big pixels and small pixels?

I thought 2017 was the year everyone figured it out but all we got was a global pandemic I like to call “dual-camera fever”. The general public’s mindset became “dual cameras means better smartphone photography!” so all the manufacturers jumped on the wagon and crammed dual-camera systems (whatever they could get their hands on) into every handset they could afford to. Even if that meant driving up prices…or that the camera didn’t end up being any good.

But the fact is, that mindset just isn’t true. Look at the Google Pixel 2, it has arguably one of the best smartphone camera experiences ever and it can do some of the best “Portrait Mode” photos we’ve seen but how many cameras does it have at the back? One.

It’s really not about how many you have, it’s about how you use them. And once the novelty wore off, I hardly ever found myself willing to sacrifice the quality from the often better primary camera for whatever new trick I could get with the often worse secondary camera.

5. DJI Spark

Yes, DJI’s Spark is a double feature in this article. While I love a lot of what the Spark embodies, and a lot of what it can do for the person who’s starting out with drones, the videographer in me simply cannot love it because at its core, it’s just a toy. A toy that has been dressed up in a way that may lead you to believe that it’s a very capable aerial videography machine.

Its biggest problem is its flight time. The drone has a quoted max flight time of 16 minutes, but in our experience that’s closer to 10-12 minutes. And when you take into consideration the time it takes this tiny drone to fly to your location, you’d probably only be left with 5-ish minutes (because it flies so slowly without sport mode), some of those minutes you will also need to fly home.

Needless to say we chewed through all 4 batteries we bought with the drone in almost no time at all, trying to get just one shot.

What’s more, the tiny drone isn’t good with wind at all. When we did a simple “rocket” maneuver, the drone struggled way more than it should have. And all the movements it made to keep it steady in the wind caused our resulting footage to be super shaky because the drone only has a 2-axis gimbal.

The takeaway here is that you shouldn’t go into purchasing this drone thinking you’ll be able to get those epic sweeping drone shots you see online like I did because you’ll just be disappointed. It’s just not this drone’s purpose. This drone is a toy that’s designed to be flown more for fun (gesture controls are really fun), some light aerial videography and it excels in flying indoors. But it’s just not a capable video drone in the way DJI’s more expensive options are. If you want portability and the ability to shoot proper aerial videography, get the Mavic Pro instead.

That said, 2017 was a fun year

I’d say 2017 was one of the more exciting years for tech. We saw a lot of cool stuff and a lot of meaningful innovations. Sure, there were ups and downs but I think that as a whole 2017 was a plus more than it was a minus. 2018 has its work cut out for it.

What do you guys think of tech in 2017? What are some of the things you thought were triumphs and disappointments? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.