As we all know, the market competition of smart phones in recent years can be said to be particularly fierce. This naturally leads to a phenomenon that various related technologies will update and iterate very fast. For example, on the chips and platforms of hardware, the mainstream flagship models are basically updated once a year. Even for medium and low-end products, it is rare to use a master controller for more than two generations. For example, in the image scheme, the models in the mainstream price segment have been "rolled" badly in recent years. A variety of exclusive and first-ever large base CMOS emerge in endlessly. Configurations such as optical anti shake and imx766, which used to be used only by flagship, have been "reduced" to the price range of 2000 yuan this year. Not to mention that in terms of smart phone design, whether in the Saipan and WM era in those years or in recent years, manufacturers have been actively promoting innovation. Even now, when the "full screen" has long been popularized and the front shape of the fuselage is difficult to play out flowers, it is not difficult to find that the material of the back of the fuselage and the design of the decorative cover plate of the rear camera module have become a new "arena" for major manufacturers to spread their creativity and even compete for technology. However, it is in this context that it took four years for a small design that looks very simple and has "simple" functions to be eliminated from the design of mainstream models, which naturally aroused the attention of our Sanyi life. In 2017, a simple little design swept the Android camp In April 2017, Samsung released its flagship product Galaxy S8. On this model, in order to promote its "Bixby" voice assistant, Samsung added an independent physical button on the side of its fuselage. And this is the "Bixby key". By default, its function is unique and unchangeable, that is, you can call out the built-in "voice assistant" after pressing. Obviously, whether from the hardware cost (after all, it's just a button) or the software function, the "Bixby key" is actually quite simple. However, this simple little button was quickly welcomed by the whole industry. On the one hand, since 2018, from LG to Sony, from Xiaomi to Huawei, more and more manufacturers have begun to equip the new machine with this independent physical key for calling out AI voice assistant. On the other hand, in the mobile version of Google App updated in February 2018, Google also specially added support for independent "Ai key", which shows that it has defaulted this setting to the standard of an Android model. From birth to seemingly eliminated, the life of independent AI keys is surprisingly long If the popularity of the independent "Ai key" at the beginning was more or less due to the fact that mobile phone manufacturers used to "pay tribute to each other" and the consideration of manufacturing selling points, it is more or less incredible that it far exceeds the "life" of many other designs. For example, when the design of "Ai key" was just born in 2017, the mainstream "full screen" of smart phones still used the earliest scheme of 18:9. By 2018, when "Ai key" was more and more common, the "banged screen" had become the mainstream appearance design. By the time of Xiaomi 9 Series in 2019, the "full screen" scheme of smartphones had been updated again. However, the "Ai key" had become the common choice of many new machines at that time. Xperia 1 III has a separate "Ai key" With the time coming to 2020, although some manufacturers have begun to eliminate the "Ai key", such as Xiaomi 10 series and Samsung Galaxy S20 series have cancelled the independent voice assistant physical keys, some models still choose "insist". Spy photo of xepria 1 IV, AI key disappeared So when did the independent "Ai key" completely disappear from the design of mainstream models? The answer is 2022. Because just recently, a spy photo of Sony's next-generation flagship model (Xperia 1 Ⅳ) was exposed, which showed that the 2022 Sony flagship model finally cancelled the independent "Ai key" used in this frontier for several generations. This marks that the seemingly simple design of "independent AI key" will finally be "abandoned" by mainstream mobile phone manufacturers five years after its birth. Although the "Ai key" seems to be gone, it is actually more ubiquitous Please note that we have been emphasizing that the disappearance of entity "Ai key" is actually just a superficial phenomenon. This is because while canceling the entity "Ai key", almost all manufacturers have integrated its functions with other operation logic of the mobile phone. This also means that for mobile phone manufacturers, although they do "Cancel" the physical AI button design on smart phones, thus saving this part of the hardware material cost. But for users, the function of "Ai key" has not disappeared in essence, and may even become easier to trigger than in the past. For example, in some models, the function of "Ai key" is integrated into the power key. When users press the power key for a long time, they will first call out the voice assistant. If they don't want to use the voice assistant, they need to press and hold the power key for a longer time before they can see the shutdown menu. And this is only "possible", because on some models, the shutdown operation has even been changed to a more complex combination key. Instead of pressing the power key, you can only call out the voice assistant. For another example, the "Ai key" on some models has been replaced by gesture operation from the bottom of the screen. This means that even in the daily operation, it becomes easier to be triggered by misoperation, and the user experience is actually worse to some extent. Why does the "Ai key" live so long? To put it bluntly, it's still business needs Is "Ai key" really practical and easy to use? To be honest, it will disappear from the physical design of smart phones. Its associated intelligent voice assistant application will hardly be mentioned at the new product launch of major brands. However, from the fact that the "Ai key" seems to disappear on the surface and is actually further integrated into daily operation, it is not difficult for us to see the intention of mobile phone manufacturers. To put it bluntly, although we all understand that the entity "Ai key" can no longer be used as the selling point of product publicity, the "voice assistant" deeply bound with various ecosystems and Internet businesses is an entrance that mobile phone manufacturers are never willing to give up. Therefore, even if the "Ai key" is gone, mobile phone manufacturers also hope that users can activate and use the voice assistant on the mobile phone more frequently. This naturally leads to the fact that the "Ai key" is not only very long-lived, but also seems to disappear, but actually becomes more deeply integrated. (Xinhua News Agency)