At Verbatim we work a lot with telephones. Not only do we all have our own mobile phones (sometimes 2), but we spend all day using the good old-fashioned wired phone as well. As a business owner, you probably have your own mobile too, and it probably doesn’t leave your side. Taking telephone calls might even be a core part of your business – something you need to help everything run smoothly. But have you ever thought about what that device in your hand might look like in 5 years, or 10? How much the technology of mobile phones might have changed? Today, we wanted to engage in a little bit of fantasy, and daydream about the future of phones.
Go Go Gadget Glasses
Right now, the majority of phones are used with a touchscreen, or a physical keypad if you’re old school. But it won’t stay that way for long. Already you can control some parts of your phone with your voice, and that’s just the beginning. With Google developing glasses that allow you to see your phone on a display, its very possible that in the near future mobile phones will be controlled by your eye movement and your mind, viewed on a ‘heads-up’ style display. This might seem far-fetched, but the technology is already being developed. Facebook’s Building 8 division has been developing technology that allows people to type with their minds since 2017, while scientists at MIT are working on computers you can talk to using only your thoughts.
Sub-Dermal Mobiles
A slightly more out-there option – but just as possible given the right technological breakthroughs. What if you never had to worry about carrying your phone around with you again, because you are the phone. Biohacking, bio implants and bio wearables might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it could be much closer than you think. We think that in the future, advancements in biochemistry and biohacking will have perfected a kind of sub-dermal telephone, one that requires no handset – just your arm. The screen and all functionality would be linked into your own biology, and you could do things like make phone calls simply by tapping some glowing icons on your arm. It’s the ultimate wearable.
Stretchy Phones
We’ve already got foldable phones, but how about a size-changing, stretchable phone? What if the next big break in display technology comes in flexible displays, where you can stretch out the screen to increase its size just by pulling the corners, and when you’re done it pings back like a rubber band? Obviously there would be a limit to how far you could stretch the display, but in theory it could mean you could turn a 6-inch phone into a 9-inch one and back, giving you all the advantages of a small screen and a big one. Work is already being done on this as we type, with Samsung announcing a prototype stretchable phone display in 2017 that could be dented up to 12mm before bouncing back into shape with no damage.
Will We Need Smartphones At All?
So then there’s the big question – will we even have smartphones in a decades time? With the rise of AI and voice search, it’s entirely possible that we could be using devices like the Google Home, Alexa and Siri to do all of our mobile phone interactions for us. With smart devices to search the web and make voice calls and computers to interact with the world, the future days of the smartphone could well be numbered.
So, what do you think? Are the smartphones of the future dead, stretchy, built into glasses or buried under our skin? Or maybe there are other options we haven’t even thought of! We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave us a comment and let us know what you think the future of phones is. And if you have any modern telephone needs, please don’t forget to get in touch with us.
