November 26, 2015
How Smartphones Will Change In Future
With the amount we use our smartphones and their associated bandwidth, manufacturers are racing to make more efficient systems and innovations. In the coming months and years, there are a number of very interesting developments in the field of smartphone technology.
The first of these to appear will be new chipsets from both Apple and Android manufacturers. These new devices will have features such as improved processing power, 4K graphics, surround sound, better battery life and faster, more efficient WIFI. With these chipsets appearing in phones from next year, high-end smartphones will be even more powerful, and ready to take the next step in personal entertainment – VR.
Virtual Reality has been around for many years but had, until recently, been subject to the limitations of other technologies. Now, however, all the big players are experimenting with VR headsets, from Facebook’s high-end Oculus Rift to Google’s low-fi offering, named (and made out of) Cardboard. Most of these aim to be powered by smartphones, adding a new dimension to gaming, videos and many other applications. There are even applications for virtual tourism, a sort of ‘try before you buy’ for travel. Simply put on a headset and in moments, you can be walking around Abbey Road Studios in London.
If we’re going to be using our phones for these new technologies, then it’s not just the processors that require an upgrade. Short battery life is a major issue for these power-hungry applications, and new innovations can suffer if they haven’t tackled this problem (such as the Apple Watch, for example). Change is coming, whether it is ways of extending the life and capacity of current battery models, new types of battery that charge faster or new technology that uses less power and therefore extend battery life up to a week.
We also need to tackle the issue of bandwidth. With LTE and WIFI being clogged by the vast amounts of streaming video that we consume, innovators have been looking at ways to make this more efficient as well. A new technology known as LI-FI has been tested this month, using light. The speed and capacity of this has been recorded as being a staggering 100 times faster than current WIFI.
Whether we use these new advances on smartphones or not remains a mystery. The wearables market is increasing and evolving just as much as the phone market, and while there are some ideas that fall behind (such as Google’s Glass and their Star Trek-inspired communicator), it’s clear that people are already thinking of smartphones as being too bulky and old-fashioned. Who knows, in the future, we might not need a device at all – we could simply wear the technology on our skin.
