5G Factor: MWC24 Preview – AI, Devices, and UX Shine

An Assessment of Key 5G-IoT Developments Including On-Device AI Progress, Voice and Gesture Innovations, and Foldable Screens Unfolding Across the Ecosystem

In this episode of The 5G Factor, our series that focuses on all things 5G, the IoT, and the 5G ecosystem as a whole, I'm joined by my colleague and fellow analyst, Olivier Blanchard, for a look at the top unfolding 5G innovations that caught our eye in the lead up to Mobile World Congress 2024. Key unfolding innovations that we addressed included why 2024 is poised as the year that on-device AI will begin to reset expectations for everyday tech products' features, capabilities, and user experience (UX), voice and gesture recognition innovations redefining the AR and smart glasses categories, and foldable screens ready to proliferate across the entire device space. 

Our analytical review focused on:

On-Device AI Ready for 2024 Breakout. 2024 is poised as the year that on-device AI will begin to reset expectations for everyday tech products' features, capabilities, and UX. Powerful AI features are making their way to premium handsets, and that trend will continue to dominate the smartphone competitive landscape in 2024. The premium handset segment will push the boundaries of what is possible in pocket-sized form factors. We see that Qualcomm is especially well-positioned to lead the way with its next iteration of the Snapdragon 8 series SOC, presumably the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, in the Android space. And while Apple has been slower to bring advanced AI features to its iPhone product, 2024 will likely mark the beginning of a more concerted effort to do so. We delve into why we fully expect that semiconductor vendors and their OEM partners to scale on-device generative AI capabilities to as many use cases and form factors as they can.

Voice and Gesture Recognition Set to Redefine AR and Smart Glasses. 2024 is also gearing up to be the year that voice and gesture recognition redefine extended reality (XR) and smart glasses UI. Voice recognition and voice-activated commands have been an indispensable UI layer for smart speakers, smart TVs, mobile devices, smart watches, and hands-free automotive solutions over the course of the past few years, but the successful integration of voice-activated commands to smart glasses in 2023 signaled a paradigm shift in how platform vendors and XR OEMs can approach the challenge of developing instinctive, natural, organic UIs into their breadth of XR solutions. We examine why combining voice recognition, eye tracking, and gesture recognition to XR headsets and glasses will also make every segment in the category a lot simpler for OEMs to design products for by using fewer moving parts and can mean fewer points of failure, more streamlined form factors, as well as more elegant, intuitive, usable UX and operating systems.

Foldable Screens Set to Proliferate Across Device Realm. Watching foldable touchscreen technology struggle to achieve any kind of enduring scale in the device market has been a bit of a head-scratcher these past few years, but 2023 turned out to be a bit of an inflection point for the technology. Now we see that foldable screens are proliferating across device categories and becoming a competitive must-have for device OEMs, it feels like the technology has matured beyond the early adopter consumer segment. We explore how the adoption of the technology by some of the world's largest device OEMs has helped shift those perceptions and that competition is heating up in 2024 between Motorola, Samsung, Google, Oppo, and OnePlus in the mobile handset segment, although no Apple foldable yet, while HP, Lenovo, and Asus have begun bringing the technology to the PC market.