Future technology ideas
The smartphone of the future: A powerhouse or a mere terminal?
Essay author: Alejandro Vicente-Grabovetsky, University of Cambridge, UK.
This essay takes a refreshingly provocative and challenging look at the ideal future evolution of the smartphone, focusing on the potential for the smartphone to act as a ‘social computer’ as opposed to merely copying features from the ‘personal computer’ (PC):
‘With the smartphone now in its teenage stage, its development is at a crossroads between growing out of the lap of its parents to become a unique mature product in its own right or to be more of the same. If it can leave the PC concept behind to embrace what we truly need as human beings, the SC, or social computer, it could become the hero that will help us return to our primeval state of sharing and socialization.’
According to the author, the PC has served as a poor model for the smartphone to emulate:
‘The modern smartphone has had a similar trajectory to the PC, where initial focus on the transmission of information shifted to a greater and greater emphasis on local capabilities. Here too, the motto of “bigger is better,” instead of “simpler is better,” has brought about much waste of our scarce resources: energy, materials and time, both for producer and consumer. The dream of the PC was necessary, but its scars upon the smartphone industry plague us up to this day with its problems in communicating and sharing information easily and instinctively.’
The essay is wary of the tendency for smartphones to acquire ever more features:
‘Before smartphones can change the world, they must be bought, and like in the primeval days of the first PCs, the greatest problem in adoption is that they are simply too expensive. STOP. Yet expense is relative: smartphones are expensive for most not so much because their cost puts them out of reach of consumers, but because their usefulness does not yet justify their cost…
‘But this problem can't be solved by cramming more features in. In fact, the greatest problem facing smartphones today is the persistent focus on the quantity of features, rather than their quality and usability on a small platform. Let's be direct and frank: feature bloat approaches the proportions of Moby Dick: telephones with dual cameras, double button-pads, infinite arrays of menus, settings, games and ring-tones, the latest, full-fledged version of Microsoft Word. And Excel. And PowerPoint. And widgets, gadgets and crapgets all tossed around the screen like toys in a sandbox.
‘To be successful, we must learn to follow a middle way between too many features and too few. Since “a little” and “a lot” mean different things to different people, the best way to achieve a balance is to endow the smartphone with modularity and customization, particularly in terms of software. The basic capabilities of the everyday phone provide a solid base to build on. On top of this foundation of calling, messaging, photography and web browsing we must erect the other features. Modularity empowers the users with choice, a commodity that is in short supply in the smartphone market as yet, and one that the consumer appreciates as much as “capability” or “potential”...
‘Don't misunderstand me. There's nothing wrong with a smartphone being able to serve many functions, in fact it is meant to, but these must be simple and clear to start with. Its core functions must be easily and directly accessible with extras built on top and around them, not stuck messily inside like the bones of the builders of the Great Wall of China. This modern, entropic tendency towards chaos and confusion makes smartphones simply too difficult to use for the 90% of people who just can't be bothered to learn to wade through the mess. You should not have to exert significant mental effort to take advantage of every single function: it's supposed to be a tool, not a mathematical problem! Instead, usage of the phone must be an extension of our own mind, as routine as daydreaming and as quick as our sight…
‘The endless pit of features in modern smartphones goes hand in hand with greater and greater hardware requirements. This, aside from frightening the wits out of the wallets of most people, threaten to devour our paltry batteries in a matter of hours, rather than days, making our phones intelligent anchors: smart, but not really mobile. The hardware part of the solution comes in the shape of newer chip architectures, which rise up as faithful Spartans to meet the power challenge, providing more and more processing power per electron. These new chip architectures forbear the coming of ever more powerful phones, whether based on classical processor-on-motherboard designs, like the Silverthorne architecture of the Intel Atom, or comprising an all-inclusive system-on-a-chip, such as the NVIDIA Tegra. Yet we must not overload their capabilities given the trend of modern software to bloat faster than hardware can support it, needing more and more of those tired electrons as they complicate simple tasks. Remember that the Spartans did fail in the end and that Windows Vista “capable computers” are capable of little more than booting the system. We must learn from past mistakes and avoid the scenario where our smartphones, whose stuffed electronic minds slug on ever slower even now, lose the worth of their name.’
The essay advocates various solutions, including modularity, improved interfaces that rely on touchscreens (and haptic feedback), enhanced screens made first from OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) and later from electronic paper (e Ink), leading on to flexible and even foldable screens. Improved security involving biometric identity tests will further improve user experience with smartphones:
‘In the not too distant future, smartphones will take the place of your wallet, your public transport card and perhaps even your keys and means of ID. The pervasive possession of mobile phones and the increasing ownership of smartphones create the chance to do what the plastic of our credit cards could never achieve: to liberate us from our dependency on physical currency. Thanks to Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, in the near future you will wave your phone in front of the till to buy your newspaper or give your phone to the waiter when the bill is due. In the airport, the passport checkpoint will be scanning your phone instead of your booklet. These steps, as well as convenient, will lead to better international security, as hardware encryption techniques become so sophisticated that illegal decryption and falsification becomes impracticably slow and uneconomic. This in conjunction with biometric identity tests will decrease the chances of our dark alleys resounding with a “your phone or your life,” since stealing the phone won't allow one to draw any money from it, aside from perhaps selling it.’
The essay concludes by returning to the notion of the smartphone as a social computer, deriving much of its value from good relations to the ‘computing cloud:’
‘Let us turn our attention to the issue of evaporating the smartphone's capabilities into a computing cloud. One of the reasons why the realization of cloud computing will be unavoidable is because most people do not require their smartphones to be fully-fledged word processors nor to be permanent mail clients or agendas. Many such capabilities are already provided by the Internet, in the shape of web applications, such as lightweight online document processors and calendars. Instead of creating programs from scratch, a better strategy is to provide easy integration of these services with the phone, allowing them to run offline and store part of their information locally, while keeping the great bulk of it online. The smartphone thus becomes a vessel for the capabilities of the new Internet, rather than remaining anchored to and entangled in the old solid web and rusty personal computing…
‘Last, but certainly not least, we must remember that the original promise of mobile phones was social, one that is yet to be fulfilled. The spread of social networks has been a step in the right direction, but will never achieve its full potential if we only ever use them while sitting in our rooms, alone, chatting across a blank terminal, exchanging, at most, emoticons ;-) For social networking to be truly social, it must be as flexible as social interactions, being available on the go. This is where smartphones come onto the stage. But also, we need our smartphones and its apps to interact with our social networks, using information not only about us, but also about our close ones to help guide our decisions: What music should I get for my cousin? Will the girl I fancy like the film I invited her to see? Where can I take my grandfather for his birthday lunch that he's never been to? This last is something we can only achieve when our lives are built on cloud castles.
‘So, does the smartphone need to be a powerhouse or a mere terminal? I think it must be a little bit of both… In the end, the smartphone is set to become not a simple computer terminal, but a real enactive window into the world. That's a voyage we're lucky to witness!’
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