What will the smartphone look like in 10 years? The most likely answer, I’m afraid, is one of two options: it’s either completely unknowable or disappointingly predictable.
The story of the smartphone thus far began with technological breakthroughs paired with ingenuity (Camera + Data = Instagram) but eventually evolved into a yearly cadence of iterative improvements (better camera). Ten years from now, when we gaze upon the devices in our hands (or, less likely, consider the implant in our spinal columns), I expect we’re going to be telling one of those two stories again.
The most likely story, as always, is iteration. Absent some breakthrough, we’ll likely have much more impressive versions of the things we can buy today. Nearly every time somebody says that there will be a massive breakthrough in five to 10 years — be it self-driving cars or augmented reality — the safest bet is that they’ll be making the same prediction five years later.
Even with iterative updates, smartphones will be radically better than they are today, and they’ll be different in some ways, too. The screens will be brighter and fold in different ways, the cameras will be so advanced that they’ll threaten to obviate even higher-end SLRs, and the digital assistants inside them will be smarter.
It’s easy to underestimate how important iterative changes can be. Would Instagram have been born if the original iPhone camera hadn’t been kind of junky? Would it still exist if that camera hadn’t become so good it has destroyed entire categories of products? OLED is just a new way of displaying pixels, but it can flex and uses very little power, so now our phones fold in half, and we take calls on our wrist computers.
A simple, incremental advancement in a component can simply make our phones faster — or it can surprise everybody by catalyzing a shift in culture. More of those changes are in our future, and many of them will be emergent behaviors catalyzed by some seemingly insignificant spec.
Take ultra wideband, for example. It’s the chip in top-end phones that allows them to locate other devices in space and also transmit small bits of data — to unlock a door, for example. Right now, it’s used to locate gadgets in the couch cushions, and there’s a promise it’ll unlock your car door soon. But just as we didn’t initially realize that GPS + Data = Uber, we don’t really know yet what else UWB could unlock (pardon the pun). I could guess, but such guesses often end up looking like the naive predictions of overly optimistic futurists. UWB could come to naught.
Whatever happens, the iterative path for smartphones will inevitably mean each phone launch will be less exciting than the last — a trend we’re already familiar with today. But that doesn’t mean that phones will become less important or impactful. Instead, they’ll become more familiar and (forgive another pun) part of the fabric of our culture. We’ll begin to more clearly see that <a href="https://www……..
Source: https://www.theverge.com/22749341/smartphones-future-predictions