There has been a lot of speculation by futurists on the landscape of mobile devices 10 or 20 years from now. Some believe that mobile devices won’t be a thing at all. They’ll be as much a thing of the past as Flip-phones were before the relaunch of the Motorola RAZR 2020. Let’s look at how this future might look like;
The smartphone: Futurists believe that we’ll have is a small credit card-sized brick about a quarter of an inch thick, mostly battery that you carry in your pocket or a watch, bracelet, or other wearables, all of which primarily recharge via solar. The Brick will be a 5G, 6G, or 7G connection to the internet that will project your own personal Wi-Fi. Everything else will run off that.
I think they’ll actually be more like the hand terminals in The Expanse: the actual handheld will be really quite dumb and just a connection to a cloud computer. It’ll be basically a display with a battery and radio modem, and very minimal firmware to manage basic connections. Maybe some limited offline storage. But 6G will probably make a interconnection requisite for everything, so there’s only a need for a lot of bandwidth, not actual computing on device.
Digital Assistants: A device similar to a hearing aid will replace all home speakers to interface with your Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). Your PDA will handle most things by voice command, like summoning your personal or Safeboda or Uber rideshare vehicle, playing media for home entertainment, ordering food or supplies, scheduling appointments, getting reservations, setting reminders, paying bills or vendors or using machine learning to understand your habits and remind you of things you might need to pick up on the way home based on your consumption habits. (It takes you an average of 4 days to go through 3 liters of milk, so you might need to pick up some on the way home today.)
Full WiFi connectivity: When you leave the house, you’ll select a device to carry with you depending on what you need, sometimes the full handheld computer that handles much of the functions of today’s Smartphones, but it will not have its own connection, rather running off your personal wifi for everything, even phone calls will run via VoIP over that wifi, sometimes just a small display screen to visually augment your connection through your earpiece. Sometimes you’ll be fine with just your earpiece and brick.
Your vehicle’s internet connection, your TV’s set-top box, all your home internet devices will primarily run off your personal wifi.
A small supplementary device left in the home will be needed to keep the home internet devices, like home automation devices, smart appliances, chore-bots like Roombas and other IoT connected while you’re away.
Net Neutrality: When people ask about why net neutrality is important, this is why. The problems lack of net neutrality causes aren’t what most people think of, like having your connection to NetFlix choked by ISP’s greedy for more fees to deliver video streaming.
In fact, the problem with lack of Net Neutrality is never technology that already exists, it’s the technology that doesn’t exist yet being delayed because the companies that own the pipelines don’t want to lose their cash cows.
VoIP: Voice over IP (VoIP) should have taken over Land Lines 10 years before it actually did. Want to know why it didn’t? ISPs have fought VoIP tooth and nail that has led some governments on levying over-the-top OTT taxes.
