[Photo Credits: independent.co.uk]

My first mobile was a Nokia 1100, I brought that in 2003, and I found that it is a real smartphone for my use, It had a flashlight, couple of snake & space attack games, calculator, alarm & stopwatch. Since then, smartphone technology has changed a lot, and today’s smartphone has a large touchscreen, an incredible camera, and high tech features likes AI face detection. Back in the days, the phone was primarily used to make calls & send SMS texts, but now we use them for our day to day activities like listening to music, setting up work calendars, internet browsing, watching videos, news on youtube and more. If someone told me this back in 2003 that what a mobile device could do in the next 15 years, I would have called him crazy, and I bet you would have done the same. It would have sounded like a sci-fi movie where no one could have predicted the future of smartphones and how it will change every human’s life on this planet. All of these thoughts got me thinking about how a smartphone future will look like & what will be the exciting new features; smartphones will have in the near future.

Flexible Displays 

The flexible display is going to be the next big thing in smartphone display technology. We have already seen a foldable-screen phone from Samsung, Motorola, Royole FlexPai & Huawei. The R&D Labs of Samsung are working on the field of stretchable displays were a Dynamic Stretchable AMOLED display can be stretched and molded up to 12mm. It will not cause any damage & it will simply regain its original flat shape. The researchers at Michigan State University are also working in a similar domain & they have developed the stretchable integrated circuit, which is first of its kind. A stretchable screen or flexible display of a smartphone will give a new dimension to the mobile device and how important it will become for watching photos, videos & playing games.

Phone Colors /Case Colors

Every smartphone comes in different colors, and people always find it challenging to select the best as per their lifestyles. Loud colors like Red, Blue, Purple stands out in the crowd, but it also looks toyish and less professional to carry out in office or professional environment. With the color-changing technology of the future, you will never have to choose from any challenging colors, and all the phones will look the same, and a single click will change the color of the phone or back case. As a futuristic concept, an incredible LED technology would allow you to switch colors as many times as you like. Additionally, you can also set colors according to days or moods. All of this might sound like a crazy idea, but Huawei 30 Pro & Motorola are is doing a little bit similar where they have gradient color on the backside of the phone.

Mind control

Today we have Siri, Google Assistance & Alexa to control our smartphones without touching them. We interact with our smartphone by our voice commands & nowadays, we do a lot of things by using our voice commands like playing music, searching for something on the internet, setting up calendars & more. Similarly, I think a mind control feature in a smartphone will be handy like voice assistance & it would bring a revolution in smartphone industries where you will be able to control mobile apps by your thoughts. You could open any app just by looking at it without making any gestures, and even you could edit images from your thoughts. No need to move fingers over the screen just by thinking you would be able to do a lot of things. We might sound crazy about this type of feature, but scientists are already making progress in this area. Back in 2017, Facebook’s research division team allowed people to type with their minds, and they received a typing speed of 100 words per minute, and it was five times faster than typing in smartphones. So this feature is a must to have in our future smartphones.

Charging – Over the Air

The battery life of any smartphone is terrible; even if you have a high-end phone, their battery will drain out after consistent use of apps on smartphones. And then you will have to plug your phone for charging, some phone makers have a turbocharger which charges your phone in 15-20minutes, and some have a wireless pad where it can charge the phone wirelessly without plugging any wire. A company called Energous is developing a technology where we can charge our phone over the air, In which we will keep our smartphones a couple of feet away from the transmitter and phone will start charging remotely. It will not require any charging pads just transmitting signals will charge the phone. 

E-ink and OLED together

As we all know, OLED is a great innovation of smartphone screen technology. OLED gives great experience in watching videos, playing games & checking out beautiful photos on Instagram. Sadly they are not best for reading as compare to Amazon Kindle, which uses E-Ink in display and gives an incredible reading experience, and it will not hurt your eyes, and you can keep reading for a couple of hours. A Smartphone user wants a complete experience in a single device rather than keeping two separate devices. For a new feature, how about turning both of them together in a single display where it will make a hybrid of E-Ink and OLED., Apple came up with a similar idea in 2011, but they didn’t do much. Some dual-screen phones have OLED screens on front and E-Ink on the back, but many tech experts believe that in the future, we will see a combined display of both.

Conclusion  

The future smartphone will not be a smartphone; it will take a device to a whole new level of form factor; we will be able to perform some tasks innovatively. We have already seen the capabilities of Google Glass, but it didn’t work well for Google and its users, but the company knows Google Glass itself was ahead of time when it was launched. In the future, I see everything will get connected to our smartphone, and we can communicate with those virtually. So that’s my thoughts for the future of smartphones, 

Now it’s your turn to think about the smartphone features which will come in the near future. Comment down below if you have any exciting ideas of the smartphones or any innovative product which you are working on.