The future of smartphone technology what’s next

The smartphone is confidently turning into the main gadget of everyday life, displacing even the personal computer. Due to the presence of accelerometers, GPS modules, NFC chips, and a host of other “chips” in them, smartphones are becoming more technologically advanced and “smarter” than computers. In what direction will the industry move next?

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) technologies seem to be the most promising today. Already today, smartphone owners can point their phone camera at a building and see, using special icons, when, for example, it was built or what the prices and menu in this restaurant are. In the future, AR will become the basic option of any smartphone, which will make it a full-fledged guide for the user in any metropolis and unfamiliar places.

Flexible screens

Today, flexible screens are slowly beginning to appear. The Korean companies Samsung and LG have especially succeeded in this matter. Unfortunately, there are no serial gadgets yet, but according to forecasts, they may appear as early as next year. What will this give to smartphones? Firstly, they can be bent and rolled so that they take up less space in your pocket. Secondly, by bending the screen in different directions, you can control your smartphone, which will give you the first smartphone sensations in games and when consuming media products – electronic newspapers and magazines.

Built-in projectors

Of course, it is impossible to endlessly increase the size of displays on smartphones. Practice shows that a 4.5-5-inch screen is the maximum that still makes devices pleasant to use. Larger “shovels” either no longer fit into pockets or are completely impossible to use with the fingers of one hand. How to make your gadget workspace larger? Attach projectors to them so that, say, a 60-inch screen unfolds on any flat surface and serves as a display for reading texts, watching movies, or photos. Samsung already has such projectors built into smartphones.

Voice control

Voice control is the future of interfaces. And although Google Now and Apple Siri still do not make smartphones a full-fledged interlocutor for the user, it becomes obvious that this is the future. A few years will pass and it will be possible to communicate with a smartphone addiction just like with a person.

3D screens

Soon, smartphones with 3D screens will inevitably appear, which will not require any special glasses to use. This will provide completely new opportunities for viewing content and managing gadgets. It is already known that Amazon, the world’s largest retailer of electronic and printed books, and the creator of the market for cheap Kindle e-book readers, is working on such a phone.

Medical technology

Medical new technology in gadgets will certainly gain momentum. A lot of sensors, tricorders, heart rate monitors, calorie burn counters, etc. will appear on the human body. In five to seven years, we will wear sensors everywhere: on shoes, glasses, belts, watches, and clothing. Not only will they allow us to monitor our health and learn about environmental conditions, but they will also serve as a kind of personal doctor, giving recommendations on how to improve our health.

New authentication methods

Forget about passwords and fingerprinting. Soon phones will be able to use the retina of the eye for authorisation. The progenitor of the technology of the future already exists. The Baidu-Lenovo A586 free smartphone from government already knows how to turn on only after it sees the eye of its owner. True, this revolutionary thing is currently sold only in China. However, there are rumours that this new smartphone authorisation method will be used in the next generation of iPhone.

Super-powerful smartphones

The speed at which the computing power of portable devices is developing is simply amazing. While smartphones with 8-core processors are being sold on the market, experts are waiting for gadgets to appear on sale that will fit both 32 and 48 cores on one chip. If you look at it, it’s inevitable. What will this give users? Soon each of us will have a super-fast computer in our pocket, capable of displaying photographic-quality computer graphics, learning in advance about user preferences, analysing large volumes of financial or meteorological information, and effortlessly handling tools like unit converters for tasks such as inches to cm calculations.

Increase data transfer speed

Samsung recently tested 5g smartphone technology, which allows data to be transferred over the Internet at a speed of 1 Gbps. They promise to begin rolling out the networks by 2020. By this time, technologies will make it possible to transfer data at speeds of up to 10 Gbit/sec. For comparison: the technical limit of LTE, the deployment of which in Ukraine has not even begun, is 75 Mbit/s. Users will be able to quickly transfer huge amounts of data between their devices.

Increasing battery power

To service this power, powerful batteries are needed. And their creation is just around the corner. Apple is working with semiconductor makers ROHM, Aquafairy, and Kyoto University to develop hydrogen fuel cells. And employees at the University of Illinois are conducting parallel research to create lithium-ion micro batteries that will increase the capacity of traditional batteries by 2000 times. Their power is enough to start the car. The appearance of such batteries is possible as early as 2024.