My first phone was a Nokia 3310. My dad bought it for me in 2001 when I was 14 years old. I was fascinated about it and I loved the feature of changing the ringtone. I could also customize the screen pattern — impressive- wasn’t it? Since that time technology has evolved a long way. If I look back to that time, today’s smartphones are nothing less than a miracle. Large touchscreen displays, high-tech specifications, impressive cameras, even bio-metrics and 3D facial recognition. Back in days, I never thought phones will be used for anything other than making calls. But today we use them for playing games, listening to music, watching videos, chatting, accessing the internet and what not. Believe me, in 2001, I had never thought these devices will be capable of doing such things in 20 years. No one could have predicted the impact of phones we have on our lives now. Such things would have nothing more than science fiction then.
And these are the things which keep me thinking about the future. How will it be? What technologies we will have in next 10, 20 or 30 years? Here, I have come up with some technologies which you might see in your smartphones in the future:
In the initial days of mobiles, we used to control it by a physical keypad. Now keypads are eventually displaced by touchscreens.
In recent times, services like Google assistant, Siri and Samsung Bixby are helping us to interact with devices using our voice. The next stage of this evolution can be the — mind control. Mind control would allow you to perform every task you can do via touch or voice with your mind. This technology would allow us to perform each task which we are doing with touch or voice. With just the thoughts, you would be able to edit images, play music, play futuristic games and a lot of other things. We are still years away from building anything like this, but researchers and scientists are making progress in this direction. One example is Facebook developing a tool that will allow us to type with the mind.
A bitter truth: Battery life of most smartphones suck. Even if your phone has a massive battery of 4,200 mAh, it’ll not last more than 2 days. Either you use wireless charging pad or conventional chargers to get the juice back. Well, this will not be the case in the future. You would be able to charge your smartphones over-the-air from a great distance with the help of powerful transmitters. Like the cell towers, these transmitters can be placed everywhere just to make sure, your devices never get out of juice. The WattUp Mid Field transmitter is the first step to such technology. Though It can charge your phone from a 3 feet distance, we can hope for a longer charging distance in the future.
While buying a new phone you don’t go only for specifications, but choosing the color is a struggle in its own. Pink, black, blue, white but which one should you choose? You might like all of them or none of them. In future, you would not have to choose the color. Imagine a smartphone with glass-like transparent back and you can change the settings to get your desired color. Wouldn’t this be amazing?
Flexible displays will be the next big thing in future smartphone technologies. With Samsung Galaxy Fold, Royole FlexPai and Huawei Mate X, we have already seen the trailer. In future, you might be able to stretch or decrease the size of smartphone display according to your needs. You can stretch your phone from corners to watch a video or you can decrease the size by folding it while traveling. Work has already started in this field of technology but we are still a long way away.
OLED displays offer a great experience for playing games and watching videos. But they are not favored as a reading display. E-ink technology provides a perfect experience if you want to read something. Though OLED has features like blue light and night mode, it doesn’t match the quality of E-ink display. In future smartphones would have both displays. One single tap and you will change OLED to E-ink. Unfortunately, for the time being nothing of this sort is possible. Apple has already filed a patent for such sort of technology and we can expect this in the near future.
In my thoughts, I see these four technologies ruling the future of smartphones. Feel free to share your opinion in comment sections and let me know what technologies you would like to see in your mobiles.
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