Discussion on:

Smartphone technology of the future

The last thing we need is spam inside our skulls. Have you ever seen the movie Johnny Mnemonic? It's not a good movie but it's a great story. Perhaps the book would be better:
http://www.amazon.com/Johnny-Mnemonic-William-Gibson/dp/044100234X

The best part is when they explain that he can exchange his real life memories for more hard drive space in the brain drive.

I think that virtualization is one of the more important technologies that will soon be coming to mobile devices. Imagine how convenient it would be to have one's work mobile and home mobile on the same device simultaneously... And it could be fairly easy for work to "wipe" the VM from the device when necessary.

There will always be a balance to strike between the functionality offered by technology, and the resulting security/safety/privacy issues. We must give these risks our careful attention, but we can't let them hold us back from progress.

Go into a hundred kitchens and you will probably find a hundred drawers that contain a very old, but still indispensable, piece of human technology called a knife. That kitchen drawer will not be locked, and you are unlikely to be challenged if you go to a supermarket, department store or cookware shop, and attempt to buy a knife. This means that virtually nobody is prevented from accessing a piece of technology that can be used to prepare a highly nutritious meal, or make an unwanted hole in a member of the public. The new possiblities offered by each new piece of technology can usually be employed positively or negatively.

My only real concern is the concept of profit-motivated organisations offering products that require elective surgery. I really hope the human race doesn't come to embrace that kind of thing.

If nothing else, my current handset's ability to be thrown across a room in disgust is a piece of functionality I'd like my technology to retain.

For example, Verizon has announced that they WILL take over part of my productive time to send advertising to me via my mobile account. I can only opt out of personalized (meaning tracking technology) ads.

What they don't realize is I am not one of those who are emotionally tied to my smartphone. Annoy me enough and I will simply turn off most of my phone's data apps. Annoy me further and I'll drop back to a lesser phone (I didn't say change carriers only because I expect all of them will follow suit), or relearn how to live without a mobile phone.

You go from the current input technologies and then jump directly to implanted/biologic interfaces, when we're clearly on the cusp of full wireless for display to large monitor or glasses, and voice input.

I see the near future being verbal command driven interactiono and wireless connectivity to display.

That is just a nightmare waiting to happen and I intend to avoid it for as long as possible. All my financials and my ID on a device which I am not allowed to fully control? No thanks.

Call me a Luddite but there have been enough problems with RFID tags in official IDs that I don't want to add my my entire life to the potential target. At least with ID and bank/credit cards I can stick them in a faraday cage wallet to keep them from being scanned as I walk down the street.

Apple are a very small step away from this reality. The iPhone 4S plays recorded video at 1920x1080 with an HDMI connection to a TV however, at the moment screen mirroring will only do the phone's native 960x640 resolution but that covers 31" of my 37" TV. With the addition of a bluetooth keyboard and cloud storage you're there. There won't be any need to hook up massive disk drives when everything is cloud based, with either Google Apps or iCloud. All other peripherals mentioned in your article are covered by the built-in camera, AirPlay, AirPrint and the Elgato DVB adapter.

NFC is rather old hat. I used to live in Japan, (about 4 years ago) and I had a phone that had NFC and it was really convenient. One of the features was for purchases at McDonald's and most convenience stores and quite a few vending machines (Edy). Another one was prepaid to get onto some trains (PASMO) and one that was linked to a credit card to use for purchases (Suica), however, that one required a password before payment was allowed. The issues of security are there, but if you have a holster or sleeve that blocks NFC, no one should be able to get anything out of the phone by just proximity. The above systems are so short range that you need to have direct contact with the reader. My phone also allowed me to turn them off, to bad there wasn't a turn all off, you had to enable/disable them one by one. If you are standing in line, just turn it on before it is your turn and then turn it off. I haven't heard of any breaches yet.

The ultimate smartphone would be a true bionic phone (not to be confused with the Motorola Droid). In the extreme manifestation, sensors would be implanted directly to your brain so you could make a call or tell the phone to perform other tasks simply by thinking them, and the display would appear in your field of vision without any physical screen.

At that point, what one is wearing or has implanted/embedded, will no longer be "smartphone" capabilities, and will be "futuristic computing", and the phone capabilities will be just one of the functions that come with that computing capability. In reality, today's smartphones are not smart telephones; they are computers with telephone capabilities as a feature, and many people use the telephone feature a lot less than the other features, like texting and browsing the web and game playing.

So, whatever form the future computers take, the term "smartphone", won't actually reflect the real capabilities, which is "mobile computing".