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| Nokia's Morph: A wearable dream of the future! |
The image above gives you Nokia's vision of the future of smartphones and undoubtedly it looks cool! Samsung share a similar vision and are also aiming for the bendy, unbreakable screens for tomorrows world. But, I'm not sure that is where the future lies. I think that's just the future for PDA's or maybe smartphone accessories.
Let me explain; things like watch attachments for your phone, which give you a snapshot of what's going on on your phone, without you actually physically taking it out and having to look at it, would be insanely useful. Imagine a touchscreen watch which is essentially a notifications area that will let you control music playback, reply to emails and texts in a fun, bendy and interactive way that you can attach around your wrist, like the Nokia Morph concept above.
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| Dockable devices like Asus' Padfones will be the future. |
This is where I think companies have a big part to play in the future of phones; they will want to keep the device divide like this; Smartphones-Tablets-PC, each one of them in a market of their own. It makes sense, they earn money from three separate devices.
I have a different plan for the future and in my head I merge the ideas of Asus, with their Padfone and Motorola with their Laptop Docks and then I take it even further! In my future the phone is the brain of all of the operations, the phone will have the specs and processing prowess of the computers of today or maybe even more (they're getting close already). They can be any size you want, depending on the amount of hard-drive memory you want, the size of the screen you want, the quality of the camera and any other feature you can think of, so in that regard they remain similar to today's.
This is where the laptop dock, tablet dock, watch notification area/remote control display and ultimately a desktop PC dock all come in. Whatever accessory you want to view your 'phone' on is only a connection, physical or wireless, away. An example would be, if want to do some browsing all you have to do is dock your phone and hey presto you have your phones display on a tablet screen, laptop screen or desktop computer screen and your work can begin.
Your phone becomes your digital world, you work, relax, play and do your other 'habits' with your phone and if you don't want to do it on the phone itself you have a full set of accessories to use with it. This completely eliminates any need for multiple devices. Think of it another way, you don't need an iPhone, iPad and a Mac. Instead you need an iPhone, an iPad dock and a Mac dock.
At all times your information is exactly where you left it, there is no need for syncing because it really all is in one place, this is truly post PC, because your PC is with you in your pocket and it handles everything.
The implications in my mind are endless. A good example to explain exactly what I'm on about is that you have a movie on your phone. If you're in bed and you want to start watching it then you place your phone into your tablet dock and can easily hold it and watch it in your hand, held above your head, if that's your preference. You fall asleep watching the film. The next day you're sitting on a train, you're bored but your laptop doesn't have the film synced to it, in today's world. That's not a problem when your phone is your computer. You whip out your laptop dock and watch it on the table on your laptop with your phone docked in it. Then you arrive at work, your boss isn't in yet and you have ten minutes of the film left, but at the moment your work PC doesn't have the film on it either. No problem, in the future you can just dock your phone and finish of the last ten minutes before he turns up late at 9:05, he's the boss no one shouts at him and he can't tell you off for cheekily finishing off your film.
Ok, that was a silly little story but I think it conveys the point, phones can be so much more and I think they should be. The future's coming and at the moment Motorola and Asus have the vision but they don't quite have it in them to fully commit to a full tech revolution. I really hope this could be the future and for some reason, if this were to come true, my money would be on Apple to deliver it.
