The telephone has changed beyond recognition since its invention in 1876, and is now both the most personal, most social and most rapidly evolving technological device. So to imagine the phone of the future is also to imagine the future of consumer technology, and its personal and social impact. What mobile phones will look like in a year or two is easy to guess: they will be slimmer and probably will let you watch television on the move. But what about ten or 15 years from now?
“The cellphone is not a telephone. It is a. . . I don't know what it is. A communications device? A tool I carry in my pocket?” says Don Norman of the Nielsen Norman Group, a consultancy, and author of “The Invisible Computer”, a book that predicts that computers will eventually be so integrated into everyday items that they will vanish.
One thing that is clear is that phones will pack a lot more computing power in future, and will be able to do more and more of the things that PCs are used for today—and more besides. Mats Lindoff, the chief technology officer at Sony Ericsson, a leading handset-maker, points out that the processing power of mobile phones lags behind that of laptop computers by around five years.
Furthermore, studies show that people read around ten megabytes (MB) worth of material a day; hear 400MB a day, and see one MB of information every second. In a decade's time a typical phone will have enough storage capacity to be able to video its user's entire life, says Mr Lindoff. Tom MacTavish, a researcher at Motorola Labs, predicts that such “life recorders” will be used for everything from security to settling accident claims with insurance firms.
Researchers at Nokia, meanwhile, speculate that within a decade, the cost of storage will have fallen so far that it might be possible to store every piece of music ever recorded in a single chip that could be included in each phone.
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