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The Motorola RAZR is reportedly returning, the iconic flip-phone rebooted as a cutting-edge foldable screen smartphone, but there's the potential for something far more interesting than just a cynical branding revival. It's fair to say that Motorola has never returned to the dizzying heights it attained on the success of the RAZR and its successors. What better way to pay homage to its innovation by bucking the trend in foldable phones today?

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More and more expensive iPhones which last longer, an increasingly competitive smartphone segment, and shakiness in the Chinese market have helped sent Apple's stock price plummeting today. The Cupertino firm issued a rare warning yesterday that its profits for Q1 2019 would be lower than expected, blaming fewer than expected sales of its star product as one of the key reasons.

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We may have reached 2019, but Apple's AirPower certainly hasn't, with the much-anticipated wireless charging pad failing to hit shelves by the end of the company's self-imposed deadline. Announced alongside not 2018's iPhone range, but the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8 Plus the year before, AirPower was to be one of the most sophisticated - and flexible - wireless charging pads on the market.

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I’m pretty sure that Masahiro Sakurai is a superhuman who is not of this world. Sakurai, who has been the director of the Super Smash Bros. series from the very start and founded Sora, Ltd. in 2005, is notorious for working long hours, sometimes to the point of injury or illness. You’d think that after four different Super Smash Bros. games (five if we’re counting SSB for 3DS and Wii U as two different titles), Sakurai would want to relax a bit. Instead, he and his team at Sora, Ltd. went along and created the biggest SSB game to date, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

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Epic Games is making rounds in headlines lately and not just because of games it publishes. It ended 2018 with some great news for gamers but bad news for Apple and Google. Actually, it’s bad news just for Google really. While it did not give out specifics, it reiterated what the game developer had already alluded to before. Its Epic Game Store isn’t going to stop at challenging the status quo in the PC gaming market. It’ll be taking its developer-centric cause to mobile but while its intentions are noble, it might do more harm than good in the long run.

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Tetris, like Mario, is one of those perennial games that will probably never go away. The core gameplay of Tetris is solid enough that it can stand on its own some 35 years after it first debuted, but that hasn’t stopped countless developers from trying to put their own unique spin on the puzzle game. Some of these attempts have been more well-received than others, but perhaps the most successful is Tetris Effect, which arrived earlier this year on PlayStation 4.

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2018 has ended and 2019 has begun. And while most end-of-the-year posts usually and rightfully look back on what has transpired in the past, we cannot forever walk forward with our heads turned backward. 2019 will be an interesting year for the mobile industry, smartphones specifically, not because of how many new things there will be. Instead, it will be interesting exactly because there might not be enough of those novelties. Here are some of the things we expect to see, or in some cases not see, in smartphones in 2019 and beyond.

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It hasn’t exactly been a homerun year for Xbox One exclusives. For starters, there just weren’t that many of them, and Sea of Thieves - arguably the biggest Xbox One release of the year - was fairly underwhelming at launch. It wasn’t all bad for Xbox One and its exclusives, though, as 2018 gave us Forza Horizon 4.

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You always hear the phrase “there’s no such thing as free lunch” to the point that it has become ridiculous and almost unbearable. It doesn’t make it not true, especially in this day and age where “free” is used as a marketing strategy, often an effective one at that. There is always a cost, whether it’s hidden or not, intended or otherwise. And in the case of almost all free services today, from Facebook to Gmail to even just search, the price you pay for $0 is your privacy.

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Generally speaking, superhero video games have a bit of a checkered past. There are some that are amazing, such as Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham games, but many more are just mediocre or outright bad. Marvel’s Spider-Man, which was released this year as a PS4 exclusive by Insomniac, is not one of those bad superhero games that have plagued us for decades.

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Apple may have seen the writing on the wall. Google may have actually sensed it sooner, which is why it didn’t seem to get excited in the first place. Although they have been the biggest proponents of this app-centric ecosystem we have today, especially on mobile, the two most influential companies in the world seem to be slowly abandoning them. Apps are no longer the great money makers they once were, even the paid ones. Some might argue they never were, at least on Android. The money may soon be in subscriptions instead, and that could drastically change the software landscape forever.

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There are many uncertain things in life but one constant thing next, other than change, is the rising prices of smartphones, particularly the premium ones. Not more than two years ago, consumers would be complaining about how expensive $800 phones are. Analysts scoffed at the iPhone X’s $1,000 price tag and predicted Apple’s humiliating defeat. Today, $1,000 has become the new normal for premium phones and there are no signs the industry is going to reverse course. And, like it or not, that’s partly thanks to us consumers as well.

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