I mean in technology and what we want our phones to do. i see threads on here saying about being disappointed in the new Iphone and on about the Nokia windows 8 phones.

sure phones can get faster and maybe technology will help with better batteries, have we nearly reached the limit on what we can do with a mobile phone?

Screen sizes can't get much larger other wise they would not be a mobile phone and would become a tablet, Cameras on the more expensive phones are more or less there.


So what do people want from their mobile phones?

Myself, I want to make and take calls, I want to receive and send text. a calender is useful and a MP3/radio player is great.

i have a flick through facebook and do emails, but they are not essential for me, camera wise I must have used about a dozen times since I had my first phone with a camera about 7 years back.

This phone I got now is faster than my old wildfire, which makes it nicer to use.

We got talk now of bonk to pay, NFC, not sure if I want that to be honest, I still prefer to pay in cash

Flexible screens and better battery life would be two obvious improvements IMO.

But, long run, the real advances will probably see us move away from mobile phones as we know them - things like Google's Project Glass hardware gives us one possible glimpse into a future without a conventional mobile phone.

A screen that works in bright sunshine would be great! The old black and white displays were far more useful for a PHONE than today's super high resolution colour displays.

With phone calls / messages being sent over the data network I don't see the need for call / text messaging support within the next few years... I'd put my money on data-only networks replacing the current format.

Single logons could be used for calls/messages/emails, such as username@network.com or something similar. I certainly think text messaging will be handled differently.

The mobile "phone" will eventually disappear, we'll just have a data device, or similar

I am not really bothered about making calls on a phone (the irony) but it can be useful. And I definitely could do without texts. Screen size, screen clarity and data connections are the most important things for me. Actually the most important thing for me right now is the ability to flash custom ROMs. I would not buy a phone that did not allow me to put my own software on it.

it's difficult to view beyond the horizon.

12 years ago when we had the nokia 5110 you probably wouldn't have predicted 41MP digital cameras and GPS because they weren't common place anyway. they have been developed since and then integrated in to phones.

we do seem to have reached a bit of a plateau for a year or two. as you say the next thing is bonk and pay. LTE. thinner.

a good rule for the past 10 years has been anything gadgety about the size of a mobile phone has been absorbed. so what else is about that size that could go in.

i wish mine had a universal remote.

Improved battery life would be one.

The biggest problem is batteries. Use location services, tracking, push notifications and your screen and you get 5 hours if that.

A bigger problem is that battery technology has barely changed in rather a long time, technologically speaking, and there haven't been any break-throughs that have made it out of the lab.

That is my main problem with modern phones, what is the point in touch screens if you can't see the things to use in bright sun. Maybe they should use something like e-ink and a back light.
I agree with other people about battery life.

at the moment we seem to be going back to larger phones and phones that can more easily damaged.

Neural interface, technology already exists including direct connection to optic nerve. Just not at consumer level yet. Give it 10 years.

I would vote for better battery life, or for instant charging technology to finally get here. Still don't understand why that hasn't been perfected yet.

on charging i've been reading around Qi wireless charging.

their philosophy is that you wont have to think about charging. that these charging points will be so prevalent that you wont need to consider it anymore.

like you'll put your handbag down somewhere with a wireless charger. the door or the seat of your car will have one and so on.

this is pretty short term. in 10 years who knows what batteries will be.

You're almost the first person I've seen who has the foresight to see the potential of wireless charging.

I think it could be almost as revolutionary as wi-fi, if it becomes prevalent enough.

i hope it happens.

i hope that my desk, my sofa, table lamp, car, coffee table all come with wireless charging.

as is often the case though it wont work until it's standardized. and we have apple in the mix to **** that up.

Being able to stimulate the optic nerve and being able to present it with a usable image are two very different things. I don't believe any such technology yet exists, inside or outside a laboratory. And even if it did, do you really want a surgical implant, with all that that implies?

Presumably you don't want your coffee table connected to the mains, so where is it getting its power from?

Are you envisaging a hierarchy of wireless power, where the sofa provides power to the coffee table, for example?

Apart from the hideous mess of far and near field power transfer this seems to require, it also means adding considerable inefficiencies to the charging process.

well yes and no.

on efficiency we are talking about up to 80% efficiency or more. and very low standby currents.if we say new phones have 2000mAh batteries @3.7V we are talking about additional energy usage of .0018kWh per charge, say 180 full charges a year. an extra cost of less than 10p a year.

my desk isn't powered, but a lot of stuff on it is, i would have no problems plugging it in. it could then be used to power my mouse, other shit it currently usb powered and my phone and tablet. same on your desk at work.

my sofa is powered. it might not be everyone's choice but i suspect a lot of people would be willing to plug it in if it would charge their phones.

they could be on public transport.

my coffee table isn't powered but it has a lamp on it. that would be fine. so does my bedside table, and an alarm clock.

my car could have them anywhere they like.

not everyone has to do all of these things. and i'm not saying this is what will happen, but the idea would be to have enough of them around that you wouldn't really have to think about it.

A thread so you can use a wrist strap and not worry about dropping it.

i think that has already been invented.

It was more irony.
Aside from battery life, something that meets with Mark Weiser's ubiquitous computing vision "When almost every object either contains a computer or can have a tab attached to it, obtaining information will be trivial: "Who made that dress? Are there any more in the store? What was the name of the designer of that suit I liked last week?" The computing environment knows the suit you looked at for a long time last week because it knows both of your locations, and it can retroactively find the designer's name even though that information did not interest you at the time."

I think instant charging would be better than wireless charging, and I imagine, easier to do, although I'm not an expert

there is no possibility of instant charging. it is a question of how quickly you can do it.

to do it in 10 seconds would require the power of 2.5 electric fires, i think, which is about the maximum that you can achieve with a domestic supply.

i don't see that happening any time soon though.

Control of devices via thought control has been around a while now though does currently require wearing a bunch of sensors on your head.

Sending images via optic nerve has already been done. Of course still very early days but that the rate of bio technology advances, HD quality images should be possible in 10 years.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_1...tish-patients/

As to having an implant, I don't think in my lifetime and possibly not my kids but the generation after them yes. People are already having electronic tags implanted in their kids so they can be tracked if kidnapped.

Of course you always have the option of an eyepiece.

That would also do away with the handset, everyone would have electronic communication embedded in them and you would effectively be on-line all the time.

Don't you brush your teeth then?

it's not the existence of wireless charging. it's the potential.

we can all see that if your phone has wireless charging you could put it on the wireless charger and not attach the wire. it's everything else.