14 DAY TRIAL // I'm pretty sure I am not the only one that has asked himself where are the mobile phones headed to. Some people seem to have the answers to this question and thank god they share the info with the rest of us. One of such individuals is the vice president of Samsung's Next Generation Terminals Team, Kang-Hun Lee, one of the few men in the world that have a direct eye on the future technologies which will be implemented in the mobile devices (in our case, the cell phones) and the right person who can actually tell us how the future mobile devices will look like and what will their capabilities be.
First of all, the Samsung Research and Development executive has mentioned the increased storage and processing power of the new handsets that will be very soon capable to leave the personal computers in a trail of dust (at least the ones we use today because at the rate the computer technology gets updated, I don't even dare to imagine where will the PCs head to). Therefore, you can easily expect by 2010 to be able to buy yourself a mobile phone with flexible or holographic display, that will have a processor running at an amazing 5 GHz frequency and with a storage space of more than 20 gigabytes, pretty much like the hard disk the usual home user had in its PC no more than five or four years ago (a little too much on the processing side in my opinion but he's the expert :)). Making an analogy to this situation and taking the 10 year technology gap between PC's and mobile devices that Kang-Hun Lee has mentioned, we can easily think of mobile phones somewhere in 2017 or 2018 that will offer the users storage spaces of more than 80 gigabytes, the average capacity of the hard disk to be found in today's PCs, so, most probably, that will be the moment when all the multimedia geeks all over the world will have the time of their lives.
Talking about multimedia, the Samsung R&D executive has also declared that digital cameras equipping the mobile devices will almost certainly be capable of capturing 3D and holographic images. Here I come and say: why not 3D video? Whatever that will look like on a mobile phone, I would give almost anything to see it and I bet anyone else would too.
Other features that will most likely be integrated on the mobile devices of tomorrow will be fuel cells, a technology that is already being proposed for marketing by some of the mobile phone manufacturers, or even solar panels to give the cell phones the ability to offer longer talk times without the need of integrating bigger and heavier batteries. Further more, another technology that is being tested these days, the capability of mobile phones to seamlessly switch from one type of network to another (be that GSM, CDMA, 3G, WiMax, LAN or whatever you may think of) is on the verge of becoming a common fact in the close future.
With all these in mind, you must know that things happening at this time on the mobile market are proving that the Samsung official isn't that far from the truth, the one scheduled for the next years that is, and the first company to act this way is the one he works for, Samsung being the one planning to launch the first 1 GHz StrongArm processor powered cell phone. Other plans of the Korean mobile phone manufacturer include a handset that will have both WiMax and GSM technology support, a device that will most probably hit the international mobile market sometime during next year's first half as Hwan Woo Chung, the Samsung Mobile WiMax Group vice president has declared at a conference in June 2006.
Besides all the technology improvements that the future will bring to our mobiles, there is another side of this story worth considering. It's the way the design of the handsets is going to evolve during the years. There are people that have a big word to say in this direction, one of those being Daniel Meyer, the winner of Nokia mobile phone design competition (oh goodie, it seems someone up there really loves me because Nokia is getting some new designers, so expect to get your hands on some beautiful and unique phones from the Finnish phone manufacturer very soon).
The idea defining the way I'm thinking about the future make-ups of cell phones and, as I have discovered when surfing websites related to this subject, the way most people preoccupied with this type of problems also do, is the one Meyer has put into words after winning the fore-mentioned contest: "it's all about people - technology is made to serve us, not the other way around. Simplicity is beauty."
In conclusion, in the future, expect to get a tonne of powerful and incredibly smart mobile devices that will surely blow your mind away in an instant with their incredible specification sheets and cat-walk looks. And, may I add, this will happen even faster that any of us is thinking because people are working on it and new, amazing technologies are being developed all over the world even as we speak.
So fasten your seat belts and start saving money because the mobile future announces itself as high-tech, veeery good looking and, with all the good stuff coming right ahead, very expensive also.