This is a final assignment of a class I’m currently taking in college: Use discovery skills, sketch out the vision of a new era of smartphones.
Followings are some things not right with the current generation of smartphones and my suggestions to it.
We can picture this future easily, there are people using eSims but not nearly as common as it will be in the future. Undetached parts are becoming less likely to stay long. Once the eSim is worldwide there will be no need to worry about when you lose your devices or break the SIM or change it when you want to upgrade to the next level of cellular network. So eSIM will be mainstreamed.
The current smartphones are designed to be addictive. Look back to the year 2007, when the iPhone was first introduced in San Francisco, the whole idea of Steve Jobs was to leverage the touch screen before detailing many ways Apple engineers improved. That is disruptive. Unfortunately, in later years in order to fulfill the revenue, they forgot the true meaning behind the actual use of a smartphone. What are we doing now with our phones? Ironically, people are now used by smartphones.
Experts use the analogy of tech companies wrapping the attention of people into packages and shipping it as a valuable source of revenue. Tech companies are now from one way to another making their products as addictive as possible which make users stick to their smartphones as long as possible so they get more of users’ attention so they can make more money. The next generation of smartphones must not amplify these functionalities.
In the era of the knowledge economy, what is truly valuable and desperately needed is the ability to produce quality work hours. We are lacking uninterruptible time periods of concentration. Next smartphones should leverage this rare and valuable skill, not deplete it as it is today. This is ‘something not right’: the current generation of smartphones is not only not amplifying the skills of working deeply, it is eradicating the ability to focus long hours which I see the most deadly wrong.
The ideal phone in the future should last very long or the need of charging and staying closely to outlets is low. Right now in the year of 2020, a smartphone typically lasts for around a day, people may charge their smartphones overnight. Sooner or later, smartphones in the future will fulfill much more electricity demanding tasks than they are now. A smartphone will not just be a device to where people mostly touch and drag, it will also be very easy to type and do current-PC tasks at least with the same speed. People will be comfortable and fast typing long hours on a palm-size smartphone. Even more, they might even project or play music at a speaker-equivalent volume. With all of these tasks, with the current technology of batteries, smartphones can last long enough for one day usage.
Our current smartphones have way too many germs on the touch devices. After the COVID-19 pandemic, clearly, sanitary innovations should be accelerated to keep track of the upcoming pandemics. The solution can simply be a screen with an automatically-bacteria-depleted, the smartphone or any smart device itself sanitized screens and buttons.
The time span of a current smartphone averagely lasts 18-24 months[5], after that, it becomes slow, outdated and the battery life is downgraded poorly. The next technologies will upgrade the power of the physical hardware automatically which means you actually don’t have to replace the hardware inside the device(by buying a new device), as I’m imagining, you can really pay a reasonable price and get updated with a set of really awesome features or not you can still satisfied with the current, fast enough smartphone. Since then, ‘ Smartphone care centers’ will be more mainstream when you want to have a different physical look of your device. For example, you might want to change the color of your case, you can replace it at that facility. Since a smartphone will be more likely to stick with a certain person for a long time. It can integrate many types of other digital, physical needs on it. It can work as an ID citizen card, a driver license card or a credit card.
A truly smart assistant will take care of all non-cognitive work performed easily in a state of distraction. A well- rounded device at which people can trust fully on and automate all the easy work. The smartphone this time will understand the owner of it, understand the routines, habits, work schedule, being familiar with their voices, and hand-writing styles. Since then, it can process all of this information and itself gives the ultimate decisions for their owner. For example, automatically perceiving your schedule of the day from a photo taken and then set waking up alarms ahead for a week.
I am not sure with any success of any future physical design of smartphones. Over the last decade, we happen to see really cool, from-the-future design tech devices. Some fail miserably like Google Glass[2] or some very cool fold screen smartphones which are released in 2019[3]. I don’t see anything wrong with the current smartphones that need revolutionary innovations. We really just need a palm size fit in our pant pocket. Anyway, sooner or later, there will be very cool ways to interact with smartphones as they are presented here[4]. As my vision for the next era of smartphones should include all the needed and focus on what is truly critical and eliminate less significant features.
[1] Steve Jobs never wanted us to use smartphones like this https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/sunday/steve-jobs-never-wanted-us-to-use-our-iphones-like-this.html
[2] 5 reasons why Google Glass was a miserable failure https://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/5-reasons-google-glass-miserable-failure-01462398
[3] Reshape your future with Samsung Galaxy fold https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/galaxy-fold/
[4] 6Genesis vision for 2030 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6ubRoZCeVw
[5] How regularly do people upgrade their smartphones https://deviceatlas.com/blog/how-regularly-do-people-upgrade-their-smartphones