I was planning to wait for the Zune phone to ship, but the Samsung Vibrant was already here. It?s a state-of-the-art Android phone with a four-inch AMOLED screen so bright it?s startling. It has a five-megapixel camera and shoots excellent 720p video. The touch screen is responsive and even has Haptic feedback. The Vibrant has 16gb internal memory and it?ll take another 32gb on a MicroSD card. Of course, it has GPS and Bluetooth and all of the other stuff you expect in a top of the line unit. And it comes pre-loaded with Avatar, just to demonstrate how effective it can be for watching videos. It?s an impressive piece of gear and it demonstrates that the smart phone has become a mature technology.
Because it?s an Android phone, there are hundreds of apps either preinstalled or ready for download?Kindle, Twitter, Facebook, Google Earth, AccuWeather, Telenav, Google Maps with traffic and satellite layers, news updates, locations of banks and ATMs and other points of interest. You can use it as an MP3 player or for watching videos. You can read books on it. You can add more apps to access movie reviews and theater locations. There are restaurant finders, calorie counters, stock managers, checkbook programs, bar code scanners for quick product information, web browsers, lost phone locator, currency converters, tip calculators, lots of games and ringtones, and even a tricorder app that uses the device?s internal sensors for local scanning of gravity, magnetism, acoustics, and more. The Android marketplace is filled with useful apps you didn?t know you needed until you installed them.
Oh, and you can make phone calls on a smartphone too.
That?s the irony. You think you?re buying a phone, but very quickly you?ll discover that you?re using it for a lot of other things more than they use it for phone calls.
Assuming the battery holds out.
All those apps use power. I have a little Samsung phone that doesn?t do any of that stuff and it?ll go for three days before it needs to be recharged. But on a heavy use day, I?ll have to switch batteries in the Vibrant or plug it into the recharger sometime before dinner.
To my mind, the biggest improvement that needs to be made in the next generation of phones has to be a three-fold increase in battery life. Even a two-fold increase would be a start. The smartphone can?t be a dependable technology until it has dependable battery life.
And the situation isn?t going to improve. The power demands on the battery are going to increase as the phone manufacturers keep adding new functions or expanding old ones.
Future smart phones will have more powerful chips. I?m already hearing mutterings about dual core chips in phones and I wouldn?t be surprised if we start seeing 4 cores or more in phones by 2015.
I?m certain that our future phones will have a lot more memory. Sandisk has already announced its intentions to make MicroSD cards with 2 terabyte capacity within the next ten years. (If they succeed, the hard drive as we know it will disappear even faster than the floppy.) With that much storage in your pocket, you?ll be able carry all your data with you everywhere. Desktop and laptop and tablet devices could become ancillary ways to access your data, no longer the primary.
Obviously, future smart phones will continue to improve and expand their camera functions. 12 megapixels are already commonplace in pocket cameras. It?s not too great a leap of imagination to suggest that someday the high-end phones will have two lenses on the back for shooting 1080p video and stills in 3D. I?d recommend two flashes, one pointing forward and one pointing up for fill. Software will likely include fast autofocusing, panoramic sweep, face-recognition, and more.
And certainly, future phones will have a camera on the display side so you can have face-to-face video calls. When the available bandwidth is wide enough, calls could have the option of going through the internet.
As the cameras improve, so will the microphones: two (or more) microphones for stereo recording with high definition sound. (Current microphones overload too easily and the resultant signal isn?t just distorted, it?s noise.) The speakers in most of today?s phones are as pathetic as those in the first transistor radios sold in the fifties, there?s lots of room for improvement there, and there are several technologies that could be applied to improve the sound. It?s possible that the screen itself may be even able to function as a superior speaker.
Display screens are already impressive. State of the art is the 4-inch AMOLED touch screen. It?s hard to imagine displays getting better than this, unless they go 3D, and I wouldn?t rule that out if the device has a stereo camera. Hard to predict what could be better or different, but the history of tech has always been surprising.
Phones are no longer phones. They?re information and communication hubs. Whatever channel we have for exchanging data?whether its voice, text, music, video, or anything else?our devices will have to receive and transmit as efficiently as possible. That means internet via whatever wireless system becomes the standard, radio and television as well. Of course, there will be uploading, downloading, and recording functions, and as long as we?re thinking big, future devices will likely have built-in projectors. Even 3D-capable is possible, if there?s enough interest or demand.
Obviously, there will be all kinds of Bluetooth accessories, including keyboards and monitors?so all you have to do when you get home is put it on your desk and your super-phone will auto-recognize those devices. But you probably won?t need your keyboard as much. Smart phones already have some speech recognition. The super-phone will have even better. In the not-too-distant future, you?ll be able to dictate directly to all your phone apps. And your apps will have to get a lot smarter in response. Instead of your fingers having to do the walking through the web, your apps will become agents. Imagine simply asking your phone, ?How many calories in an Egg McMuffin?? and having it go to the web, do the search, and report back, ?300 calories.?
All of the above is the easy part of prediction. The technology already exists, we?re just watching the inevitable convergence of all the separate devices that we have ever loaded into our pockets and purses: music players, GPS, phones, still-cameras, video-cameras, radios, personal information managers, ebook readers, compasses, calculators of all kinds, car keys, credit cards, business card scanners, and even a few things we never carried around in our pockets, like maps, watches, alarm clocks, garage door openers, TV remotes, game console controllers, notepads, diaries, calorie counters, movie listings, restaurant reviews, event calendars, and email. Why not have them all available in one ultra-purpose device?
Given all the hardware capabilities that are already showing up in our phones and will only continue to improve in future iterations, the real question we have to ask is?what other synergistic combinations are becoming possible? Phones today will let you email a photograph of a check to your bank and have it automatically deposited. What will the software do tomorrow? Let you use your phone instead of a credit or debit card? Yes, that?s already in the works too.
But all of the above is just preamble. Here?s the real prediction.
The killer app that will transform the super-phone will be the ?agent? or the ?secretary? or whatever term we eventually use for ?all-purpose information manager.? It will combine speech recognition with do-what-I-mean understanding.
It?s already beginning to happen. Today, your smartphone has simple speech recognition. You can say ?call Mom? and it will dial your mother?s number On some phones, you can speak an address to your GPS app and it will compute driving directions. On some phones, you can dictate letters and emails. As speech recognition improves, so will the way apps use that ability.
So my prediction is that the super phone is going to evolve into a personal assistant. This isn?t a difficult prediction. Science fiction is full of examples: Clarke?s HAL-9000, Heinlein?s Mike and Dora, almost all of Asimov?s robots, my own HARLIE, and of course the Majel Barrett voiced computer on the starship Enterprise.
But when the intelligent personal assistant is riding in your pocket or purse, monitoring your location and your caloric intake and your bank account and your various purchases, that?s when things are going to get interesting. I might be able to predict that you can tell it, ?Remind me to pick up the dry cleaning this afternoon,? and around three O?clock as you?re passing the mall, it?ll beep and say, ?Don?t forget to pick up the dry cleaning.? It might remind you, ?You already have this song in your collection, it?s on your hard drive at home. Should I retrieve it?? It could tell you, ?Your sister?s birthday is next week, she likes Godiva chocolate, dark chocolate truffles. Shall I order a delivery of a two pound box? What would you like on the card??
But while I can predict those easy possibilities, I?m equally certain that there are far more interesting and spectacular synergies that cannot be predicted and will surprise us all.
What do you think?
?????
David Gerrold is a Hugo and Nebula award-winning author. He has written more than 50 books, including "The Man Who Folded Himself" and "When HARLIE Was One," as well as hundreds of short stories and articles. His autobiographical story "The Martian Child" was the basis of the 2007 movie starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet. He has also written for television, including episodes of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Twilight Zone, and Land Of The Lost. He is best known for creating tribbles, sleestaks, and Chtorrans. In his spare time, he redesigns his website, www.gerrold.com
lg hdtv
asus
camcorder
digital camera
No comments:
Post a Comment