What is the future of Smart Phones?

For many of us who worked in the corporate environment, Blackberry made it possible for us to work outside of our offices.  And as Blackberry evolved  and was joined in the market by the iPhone and other phones with a plethora of applications, the Smart Phone was no longer simply a device for conducting business.

The Smart Phone made it possible for us to have access to social media, shopping, surfing the web, and other activities on the go.  This gave us tremendous mobility as we no longer had to sit all day in front of our PCs.

And as we look forward and contemplate what is in store for the future of Smart Phones, further changes in our life style appear to be in the horizon.

Increasingly we are spending more hours with Smart Phones relative to PCs as most of the features in PCs are now available in Smart Phones. Added to that, Smart Phones have tremendous mobility that PCs lacks because of size and weight.

Along with this shift to using Smart Phone as alternative to PC, the structural change is occurring with the technology used in media.  The shift from hard print to digital has enabled communication on a global scale.

News is now conveyed instantaneously across the globe with pictures captured on Smart Phones. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are disseminating information immediately, compared to days when news was in hard print. Such global scale communication is even changing the political environment in some parts of the world formerly isolated from other cultures and ideologies.

So, what is the future of Smart Phones?

Right now Smart Phones look pretty similar regardless of brand, but there is no reason why it should remain that way. As the form factor becomes ubiquitous, manufacturers will explore the design elements available to them. This will result in Smart Phones with unique colors and detailing.

The functionality of Smart Phones will continue to expand as well. Smart Phones already have features such as GPS, camera, phone, email, web, texting, and social media but the functionality will expand as more applications become available.

While it is hard to imagine today, it is possible that ordinary telephones and PCs may even become thing of the past just as typewriters and photographic film were displaced as new technology made them obsolete.

Other articles have mentioned such future possibilities as:

1. More Artificial Intelligence and better gesture control
2. Context awareness and more integration with sensors and other phones
3. Different display options (rollable displays, better picoprojectors and more)
4. Increased processing power and better energy efficiency and management

In other countries like Japan, the use of Smart Phones as the means of conducting commerce has been in existence for over 6 years. People can purchase variety of things such as train tickets, movie theatre tickets, and make payments for practically anything. So the electronic wallet is not a dream but a reality.  Recently Google announced Google Wallet so this shift is headed to the United States very soon as well.

As the features of Smart Phones continue to increase, it is likely to have a profound impact on our lifestyle in ways that we can’t imagine today.