Devices 2019
September 20th, 2008 | Published in Blog, Design, Gadgets, Sci-tech, Web
Google posted a great little article about the future of mobile, projecting how mobile devices will take over the internet.
Just as young people consider “email is for old people”, I see that we are on the verge of the desktop being seen as only for “work”, laptops for “mobile work”, and the decedents of cell phones for most of the casual and personal web use.
I already noted in a previous post how I see my web browsing habits changing given ubiquitous wireless data and a fairly decent user agent (iPhone).
Here are a few things I think will need to happen before the children of smartphones fully become the new PC.
Wireless video
Handheld devices have small screens, but what about when you need something bigger? While Microsoft’s surface is a neat tech-demo, I see Surface-like devices becoming aware wireless displays. Sit your phone next to one and they should auto-link up giving you two screens to interact with data through. Just like you get a WiFi promt as you move into network range, you can be prompted to add any wireless displays in range to your mobile’s “Spaces”. This way you can just add-and-drag photos from your tiny handset to the big connected-TV in the living room.
Expandable UI
This takes the first point further. Not only should you be able to display photos or a presentation from your mobile on any connected display in range, but that display should be available as an input device if it supports it. So that MS Surface table can act as a big interactive white board and all mobiles connected take archives of the multi-touch-meeting with them.
The Semantic Web
The Internet is evolving into a much more semantic, intelligent system than even today. The next wave of technology will allow for natural language text searching, and soon spoken conversational interaction with search engines. In addition, as markup becomes more and more semantic, autonomous user agents will start to become very useful. Our mobiles will be the place we create these software agents and set them free on the network to do work. These will be a lot more advanced than today’s Google Alerts, to be sure.
Beyond 2020 Things look to get really strange. The line between your cognitive mind and your garden of software agents will blur. It will take biological integration to support this, but by the late 2020s we might have routine direct brain-computer linkages (human trials of brain-implant controlled prosthetic are starting soon). These might eventually be in the form of synthetic organisms, designed to be symbiotic with us, living inside the capillaries of our brain, linking the orchestra of mind to the network. Then VERY quickly we will struggle with where the conscious mind ends and where our software-agent “iterations” of mind fit into our culture and law.
Of course a million things could happen, and the future will unravel in ways no one could have anticipated. But one thing is for sure, mobile devices are here to stay.
