Future of the Cell Phone


The iPhone form factor is here to stay: it’s about the largest possible device that still fits into a pocket, and unless we all change our dressing habits in 10 years (unlikely), we’ll carry a device with that form factor.

It will be improved, of course, with more memory, more sensors, more connectivity options, more situational awareness, more data feeds, better screen resolution and so forth, but it will be very recognizable with what we know now.

It will still make and receive calls, and we’ll still use it to look up information such as a map of our surroundings.

It will also become the hub in a hub-and-spoke system of communications with smaller devices we’ll also carry. Today’s Bluetooth headphones are the first example of that. More in a separate post.


One response to “Future of the Cell Phone”

  1. I think the iPod form factor may disappear in ten years. I think you’re right that we’ll carry–more likely, wear–smaller devices for display and audio output. Think contact lenses and semi-permanent ear buds.

    Yes, such devices assume a breakthrough in power. Perhaps they’ll be powered by natural biological processes? Blinking? Blood pressure? Our very metabolism, in the form of the differential between skin temperature and ambient?

    After all, it’s likely that the power requirements of these small devices will continue to go down, so power sources that seem impractical now might be practical in ten years.

    Now, if the hub you propose no longer must include a large display and speakers audible when held in the hand, it can be a blind device that only provides processing and communications to the wearable devices. Will we still carry that blind brick in a pocket? Would it be more comfortable to wear as a necklace or a wristband? Not sewn into clothes, surely, because it’s inconvenient to move it from one outfit to another, and expensive to sew into every piece of clothing. Shoes, maybe, since walking is a convenient source of power.

    However the blind brick is carried, it’ll become a fashion accessory like a watch or eyeglasses. (I’m fond of my own fan-fic back-story for the earrings worn by Star Trek’s Bajorans: Not just familial markers, but vestiges of wearable devices from Bajor’s more technologically advanced past.)

    And I believe even that blind hub will not often be carried in the pocket: Our homes, offices, vehicles, and public spaces all will act as hubs. The individual’s electronic personality, which today takes the form of a device we carry in a pocket or in a hand, will instead be in the cloud, accessible whenever our surroundings offer some local processing and a connection to the network.

    Only rarely will we actually need to carry around a brick containing a battery, processor, and radio. Perhaps while biking or walking, if the nearby houses and buildings don’t provide any shared services.

    The good: No more need to remember to put a brick in your pocket before going out.

    The bad: A whole new trust infrastructure is needed in order to use shared computing for tasks we prefer to keep private. Our personal data and programs will be on a cloud server we carefully choose and trust. But we’ll need to run those personal programs and manipulate that personal data on shared, local processors provided by our employers, government, local businesses, even private vehicles passing by. I don’t think we yet have protocols that enable an untrusted local processor to provably do what we tell it to do and nothing more.

    There’s a current-day parallel to this trust problem: Brad Templeton wants hotels to provide USB charging stations and keyboards, but any such device can easily infect your laptop as soon as you plug it in:

    http://ideas.4brad.com/powered-usb-hub-my-hotel-room-and-more

    So, all we need is bio-powered wearable UI devices and trusted computing that may be mathematically impossible, and we’re there!