POSTED BY

Joel Johnson

AT 7:08 AM
Tuesday June 16, 2009

Design • Phones and Wireless

invisible • phones

What will phones look like in a decade?

...asks Alissa Walker of three smarty designer types:

⌦ "People will design their own phones, picking the size, weight, battery life, materials, screen: Built to order." Doubt it! Standardized forms are necessary for people to write software that provides a consistent experience.

⌦ "The earpiece ring is worn on the thumb, the mic on the pinky." Ha ha, no.

⌦ "I can access all of my communications data from the cloud--from any phone or device that is convenient." Here we go.

Gosh I am so smart.

At this point, imagining phones ten years out seems pretty pointless. The phones we use today are not fundamentally different than the smartphones of a decade ago in conception, but we hadn't anticipated exactly when the touchscreens and the processors would become good enough for programmers and designers to finally crack the user interface issues in a way that worked for the mass market. But if you think about it, many of the things that make the iPhone, Pre, and Android phones work—the gestures, the integration with cloud data services, app repositories—were totally possible at least in modest form ten years back. It just took a while to get everything lined up.

I guess what I'm thinking is that imagining phones ten years ahead isn't nearly as difficult as building the phones in two-year intervals that get us to where that vision may be. We know what we could be doing with phones for several years; now it's up to the creators to add more capability in salable ways. (It would be fantastic if every phone had a barometer and a thermometer to act as weather stations, but until the sensor package is essentially free, it's too specialized of a function to justify the cost. But that does make me realize that phones could stand to incorporate more of the capability of sports watches, including especially water resistance. Tough nut to crack, but maybe Casio is onto something there with their line of "toughphones".)

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12 Comments

MB

#1 – 8:10 AM June 16, 2009

Could we get decent voice quality? Please? The last time I had a cell signal that approached landline quality was in the middle of nowhere, Ireland, in 2003. All of the other stuff is neat, but, you know, it's still a phone.

Adam

#2 – 8:26 AM June 16, 2009

I think voice will become an increasingly viable means of interfacing with computers/phones, at least for semi-casual activities. When that happens, the shape of the phone becomes less important.

Other possibilities are gesture recognition, which means that we can watch people walk down the street talking to themselves and twitching about strangely. The world truly will have gone mad. :)

Agies

#3 – 8:39 AM June 16, 2009

Clearly we will all be using Bananaphones in 2019.

TJ S

#4 – 8:50 AM June 16, 2009

Let's see, 10 years from now?

- Pico projectors will be in most phones, if people haven't already gotten tired of "prosexting" (which is the word I just made up, to describe teenagers projecting porn onto any and every available surface).

- 4G will finally be just about everywhere. MB will get the voice quality asked for.

- The fast data connection (combined with higher residential broadband speeds) will allow anybody who wants access to their home media library. Since optical discs will likely have given way to downloads, this means you can watch any movie that you own, whenever you want...

- ...and it'll be in HD, on an OLED screen, with ridiculous pixel density.

- The camera sensors will be marginally better, but most of the improvement here will come from higher quality lenses, and DSLR-quality image processors (thinking Canon's DIGIC IV, or so).

- Bluetooth 4.0 will be planned around accommodating transmission of the phone's video output, and sending back user touch input. This will allow ubiquitous wireless docking with larger screens and full sized keyboards when at home. Since the phone will likely be about 2-3x as powerful as current netbooks, it will be feasible to use as a general purpose computer.

- In the car, since people won't stop texting no matter what, Bluetooth will be used to put texts up on the dashboard, much as GPS currently is. Txt replies will be handled by finally-good speech recognition.

- Impossible to guess at what the OS will look like. If I knew that, I'd have a much better paying job than I currently do.

wayn3w

#5 – 10:43 AM June 16, 2009

Cellphone implants.

Fang Xianfu

#6 – 6:17 PM June 16, 2009

Water resistance - I'd heard from a chemist friend that a process has been invented whereby you can coat practically anything in a microscopically thin layer of plastic, which effectively renders it water resistant. You put the device in a chamber containing a "mist" of the particles, and some chemical magic happens that adheres them to any exposed surfaces.
Apparently they did it to an iPhone and called someone with it in a tank of water - it all went swimmingly.

Jarvik7

#7 – 10:06 PM June 16, 2009

Most Japanese cellphones are already water resistant/proof.

overunger

#8 – 12:59 AM June 17, 2009

That Sony OLED phone/video bracelet concept at CES looked pretty sharp to me - gets my vote. Unless some implant is invented that makes phones obsolete.

Daemon

#9 – 2:23 AM June 17, 2009

You'll have to sign over your soul to get an iphone.

Oh, wait, you already do.

The Mockingbird

#10 – 5:30 AM June 17, 2009


Putting a barometer and a thermometer on a phone is a useless waste of space; instead, use software to sync up with local weather data from the internets.

Moriarty

#11 – 5:49 AM June 17, 2009

Toughness is a good goal. I want a phone that can pass through the digestive tract of a whale.

ChinkAdelic

#12 – 3:38 PM June 17, 2009

I am sooooo buying that new earpiece....gosh i love technology!!!XD

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