The most visible face will be the virtual assistants. We can have real conversations with them, and we can not distinguish them from a human. It is something that is already happening.
In the smartphones of the future we can use the virtual assistants to reduce the dependence on the keyboard, buy, schedule tasks, adjust the agenda, or ask them to tell a story to the children.They will even be able to understand our emotions. Huawei is already working on it. It will not bother you if you notice angry or concentrated, or try to cheer you up if you are sad. It will be our psychologist, our confidant and our friend. We will have artificial intelligences that debate with humans in television programs, that play eSports better than us , or that invent stories , write books or film movies and television series.
Artificial intelligence
The AI will also extend the life and improve the performance of our phones . It will be able to adjust the battery consumption and the speed of the chips depending on the use, managing the dissipation of the heat.
The AI will also avoid many of the mistakes we make. It will refuse to delete critical files that we have deleted without realizing it, it will prevent you from accidentally calling someone at 3 in the morning, you will scold us for driving too fast, or you will remind us that we have not locked the door when we left home .
All maintenance and organization tasks that we now perform manually, will be borne by the IA. You will learn how we like to order photos or music, and it will do so automatically. It will delete repeated photos, answer emails and WhatsApp messages automatically, and make the shopping list for us.
But it will also have much more complex functions, such as managing our economy and keeping track of our expenses, postponing payments and overtaking others, automatically losing food or everyday items to stores, or managing a repair with our customer service. a mark. In fact, machine-to-machine conversations will be common in the coming years.
Another aspect to consider will be the influence of AI on our capabilities . If he can do almost everything for us, if he can become our advisor, confidant and friend. Will he turn us into intellectual and social invalids? Do not we begin to be already?
The 5G connection
Another technological innovation that we will enjoy from 2020 on the smartphones of the future, will be the 5G connection. Soon it has been baptized with the name of the Gigabit Network, emphasizing that it will be between 5 and 10 times faster than the 4G connection , with speeds from 1 Gbps, although right now they reach 6 Gbps. And that’s true, but it’s not the most important thing about this new technology.
” The transition to 5G will be similar to the arrival of electricity, ” summed up months ago Cristiano Amon, vice president of technology for Qualcomm, one of the technological giants that leads the 5G race. ” When everything is connected, not only your smartphone or your tablet, we will assume that connectivity will be present there in the same way that we understand that we have electricity within our reach anywhere ,” he said.
The greater speed will speed up the current tasks. We can enjoy 4K video with the same speed that we now access 1080p video on the mobile. Tasks such as downloading apps and games in seconds, or maintaining video conferences with a dozen people at the same time, will be a reality.
The greater speed will open the doors to experiences that we already knew, but that until now were impossible to carry out in a mobile, due to its slow connection: virtual reality in real time, online game with hundreds of players, exchange of files instantly , remote team projects, and much more. Equally important, the increased bandwidth will allow more layers of security to be added to the connections.
But the 5G connection will go much further than a simple speed increase. Two other key points will be decisive to literally change the world: low latency, and multiple simultaneous connections.
Smartphones of the future
The low latency means that the actions that we carry out through the Internet, will have an instantaneous response in the destination. It is what is called critical mission services . This will allow, for example, a surgeon to operate remotely a person who is on the other side of the world, and their actions will be reflected instantly, there will be a delay as it happens now. An authentic Touch Internet that consists in seeing, listening and manipulating objects remotely.
You can control a drone remotely and accurately, and the autonomous cars will communicate with each other instantly, reacting much better to unforeseen events. The traffic light networks can adjust the lights in real time according to traffic, instead of following a fixed routine. Low latency will also benefit online gaming, cloud gaming, and any task that demands a chain of action / instant reaction.
Finally, multiple simultaneous connections means that instead of connecting three or four devices to your WiFi network at the same time, you can connect 30 or 40. The implications of this will be revolutionary. Internet of Things , turned into reality. Literally all the objects in your home, from the alarm to the thermostat, the speakers, the microwave, the lights or the fridge, will be connected to the Internet at the same time, and we can control them from the mobile.
An even greater revolution is that these machines of the Internet of things will communicate with each other without human intervention and, thanks to artificial intelligence, make decisions on their own. The mobile assistant, depending on the agenda of the day, will ask the thermostat what temperature it does, and will program it to heat the house before the owner arrives. As he has seen that he has had three meetings and will surely be tired, he has asked the speaker to play relaxing music. He asked the refrigerator if there were lettuce and tomatoes, and as he said yes, he has proposed to his boss to dine a light salad.
The 5G connection will change (again) the way we relate to technology, and this new relationship will not be easy to assimilate. The 5G connection will be the gasoline needed by artificial intelligence and Big Data to conquer the world. And not all will be positive consequences. More than 800 million jobs could be replaced by machines , in the year 2030.
More fast charging and solar charging
You can not talk about the future of smartphones without mentioning your Achilles heel: the battery. A mobile is a wonderful device but only if the battery is charged.
We have the feeling that the batteries of the mobiles have not evolved, because a decade ago they barely endured one day, and in 2018 too. But make no mistake, the mobiles of now are 20 times more powerful than before, and thinner. The batteries have improved: a battery of 2008 would not stand even an hour on a current mobile.
The problem is that the mobiles are increasingly powerful, and on the other hand the battery manufacturing technology can not improve much either.
There are many prototypes that last several days, but they are not viable when you have to make hundreds of millions. So it is unlikely that we will see an improvement in the autonomy of mobile phones in the short term, unless the technology of the batteries changes. What we will see will be improvements in fast loading . In the near future, we can charge the phone in a matter of minutes.
Also, more and more mobile phones will include wireless charging.
A trend that will save us many problems, will be the solar charge. Work is being done on mobile batteries that can be charged with the sun. There are already some, like this special edition of the iPhone X with solar battery that was given to Elon Musk. It will be a great relief to get rid of the charger.
Other ideas that are being tested are recharging by movement (while walking) or by friction, when walking on the sidewalk with a certain footwear. Concepts such as supercapacitors, which are loaded in seconds and last days, seem far from commercial.
Biometrics and privacy
Surely the most controversial technological novelty that smartphones have released in recent years, has been biometric sensors. Fingerprint readers, heart rate meters, disease detectors, facial recognition Technology that, for the most part, nobody has asked for, and that to function requires serious violation of our privacy .
It is difficult to predict which sensors will include the smartphones of the future. The fingerprint sensor was most trending a year ago, and Apple removed it from the iPhone X . Now bet on facial recognition , which has been copied by Android makers who still believe that copying what Apple does is a good business decision. A decade ago, yes. No longer. It is a fact that many people do not like that a camera is continuously recording their face. It feels uncomfortable . It was demonstrated with the failure of Google Glass , where its users suffered aggressions from people who thought it was being spied on.
Augmented and Virtual Reality
It can not be said that Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are modern technologies, since they have been with us for more than 30 years. But only now can they be generated in real time and with sufficient graphic quality, to be useful.
In the case of Virtual Reality, the tendency is to create autonomous glasses or associated with powerful hardware such as a PC or a console. It is obvious (although they wanted to make us believe otherwise) that a mobile phone does not have enough power for Virtual Reality.
But as the smartphones of the future become more and more powerful, it is likely that virtual reality will once again return to mobile phones, with a minimum of graphic quality enough to believe it.
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