Phone Smart - What Your Phone Might Do for You Two Years From Now | Hacker News Reader

Phone Smart - What Your Phone Might Do for You Two Years From Now

nytimes.com

Two years seems pretty easy to me.

The things phones do 'ok' now, they will do 'well'. (video, 3d gaming, low-light photo) The things they do 'poorly' now, they'll start doing 'ok'. (augmented reality, pico projection)

And things they don't do will have to break into 'poorly' pretty soon, if they're going to have any chance of being counted as actual features in 2 years. (vs maybe being hypothetical capabilities backed by a few buggy proofs-of-concept)

And massive changes to the ergonomics of the device won't happen. Projected keyboards? nope. Folding screens? Not a chance in hell. Auto-peering mesh networks? Not outside of trade shows.

it's sad because the problem of meshing has been solved pretty well ( olsr, batman, etc.), but there's almost no motivation for the big networks to implement it.

I predict status quo and price creep, while Android carves at the iPhone's market share. Instead of new features, we'll get the same features on different platforms!

Two years is a tough call. part of me wants to say almost nothing will change. Look at the first iPhone vs iPhone 3GS.

Here are some safe bets:

1. Augmented reality will really be catching on. Many smart phones will offer augmented reality applications that we would find amazing in 2009.

2. Better cameras and most phones will have flashes.

3. The beginnings of universal translators, so you can at least get an idea of what the other person is saying.

But what do you guys think?

The most interesting idea there is the "third cloud" - that our phones might share information with each other automatically.

I've often wished that, as I sit just out of signal inside a building, that my phone could talk to one nearer the window and use its signal to connect to the outside world.

But this then raises all sorts of questions, both security related (man-in-the-middle attacks) and business related (how do I pay for using their bandwidth).

Kind like of a mesh idea?

Exactly!

I'll be the outlier and talk about the new _voice_ capabilities on the phone -- you know, the high utility part?

Google Voice will supplant voice plans (data only please, Verizon) and Apple will launch their mumble mumble project to do the same.

I ranted about it here: http://igmus.org/2009/10/our-stalled-phone-innovation

Uh oh. Smart voice recognition prediction.

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