The MWC (Mobile World Congress, ex-3GSM) is again wrapped up for this year. A few things that were widely expected never materialized and some things – like the Nokia S60 touch UI – proved to be underwhelming to say the least. Maybe it was all that or the fact that I unfortunately wasn’t present on the spot or something else, but I was left somewhat disappointed by the product and service announcements. Lots of new things, yes. But nothing revolutionary, nothing that would make me go “wow, that’s really cool“. This led me to think about mobile phones and their development in some more detail.

Soon all phones will be multimedia computers

After a relatively slow start, mobile devices have undergone dramatic strides of development over the past five years. Starting from life-transforming but rather boring, plain mobile phones they have developed to incorporate and even take on compact digital cameras, personal navigators and MP3 players quite successfully. Late last year, the Nokia N82 (which I quite like, see review here) was launched as Nokia’s top-of-the-line imaging device. Starting from over 600eur, even today it costs over 500eur. Now this week at the MWC, Nokia announced the 6220 which essentially shares all the key features of the N82 – 5 MP camera with autofocus, Carl Zeiss lens, Xenon flash, QVGA screen, HSDPA and so on. As can be judged from the model number, the 6220 is profiled as a mid-range device. Think about that for a while.

The 6220 will be available in the 3rd quarter this year (so, in six months or so) for an initial estimated price of 325eur, destined to drop below 300eur by Christmas. With operator subsidies, expect it to be available for “free” in some markets. So it seems all the top-end features are now going mid-range and I tend to agree with the analysts who think this was one of the most important product launches at MWC – and if mid-range phones are going high-end this year in terms of features, it’ll only be a couple of years more before the same features will be found on your cheap “basic” phone.

Thus pretty soon – which in this context is something like five years for developed markets and maybe ten for developing – we will no longer have phones that are just phones. We’ll all, from Canada to China, be toting what once were clumsily called multimedia computers. It’s hard to overestimate the potential change this will bring over time, but let’s focus on technology for now.

Diminishing returns on future features

However, the high-end devices of today represent, in my opinion, the end of the road of fast device development cycles. N96, the newly announced Nokia flagship product slated to be available in Q3 – roughly one and a half years after the original N95 – doesn’t really bring anything dramatically new to the table. Sure 16GB of memory is some 8GB more than the 8GB the current top-of-the-line model has, but so what? What’s another 8GB between friends? ;)

Once you start doubling the phone memory beyond that 16 or 32GB, you quickly hit diminishing returns. What can you do with 64GB that you can’t do with 32GB in your pocket? Not much, I’d say. How about 128GB? Or 256GB for that matter? I claim they don’t enable any new use cases – the average person will already have all their music in 32GB with room to spare for photos and video. In the future, HD-quality videos will take up more space, but how many will shoot for hours anyway? And if you do, you just do what owners of digital cameras do these days – buy more memory cards.

And memory is just one of the areas of diminishing returns. Megapixels is another, one where we’re already past reasonable limits. The compact digital camera industry has been on a misguided megapixel-crusade for years now, resulting in consumers ending up with no better images but just more massive files. High-end phones now commonly have 5 megapixels (or more) and that, I wish, is the end of the road there. Even 5MP is already too much considering the optics and the tiny sensors – laws of physics simply dictate that the additional megapixels will not bring improved image quality. On the contrary.

Then consider that memory and megapixels are at the easier scale of things to improve; if improving even them is proving futile – or at least hit the law of diminishing returns – what about other features? There are tough nuts to crack in power consumption, the 3W-limit with heat dissipation on mobile devices, battery life, display technologies and many other areas. And I don’t see any of them being dramatically improved in the near-term future.

The next major breakthroughs?

Given that, I predict a relatively quiet, gradual development of mobile devices over the next few (or five) of years in terms of features. I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt I will be. We will see more memory, more (useless) megapixels, some user interface tweaks here and there and all that, but none of them will alter the phone usage so dramatically as the developments up until now have. None of them will cause dramatic changes in our lives compared to the current high-end phone users.

What about touch, you say? Well sure, a lot of hype is put on touch these days, but it’s just another interface type and not a revolutionary one at that. Touch devices have been around for a long time and they will not, in my opinion, significantly change the use cases of our devices. Beyond basic touch, haptic interfaces will soon make them that much more appealing, but though cool, even that is a relatively small step. It’s still an interface that relies on the same input method as keys do – fingers – and will not bring about truly revolutionary use cases.

So what will, then, be the next revolutionary things? That’s not an easy thing to predict, of course, but my vote is on augmented (and maybe virtual) reality displays and “mind-reading” technologies. These may sound like some pretty far out inventions, but cursor and robot control is already possible by devices that “read thoughts” or more precisely brainwave patterns. Augmented reality displays, perhaps projected directly to your retina through tiny lasers, will open up worlds of new possibilities. But it’s precisely because such major breakthroughs are still in the labs – or not even there yet – that they’ll take quite some time to reach the market.

So then what to expect in the future?

But since many people, including myself, are impatient, we want the cool devices yesterday. If we have to wait for years and years for the really cool stuff, what can we expect meanwhile? Stuff like this Aeon concept phone from 2006? It’s feasible – and at least it’d look cool.

Extrapolating the already-visible trends and playing it safe, in another ten years your high-end feature-packed phone is probably carrying hundreds of gigabytes of memory with most of your music and photos and videos on it, is equipped with flexible, haptic, high-resolution touchscreen display, can record HD-video and take decent photos (with single-digit effective megapixels, I hope) with possibly a liquid lens providing the zoom, can view live video of practically any TV channel and provide almost any video content on-demand, might use fuel cells or advanced battery technology to last through the day or even two – but it will, most likely, still be a device you use with your hands, look at what would be recognizable as a display even today, surf the web, listen to music etc. In other words, the use cases are largely identical to those present today, only better.

But give it twenty years and some key technology breakthroughs and your “phone” will look nothing like a cellphone today. Think embedded devices and bioengineering. Think seamless augmented reality displays. Think Babel fish.

Meanwhile, you’ll note that I wasn’t talking about services here but hardware. Services and applications are nice in the sense that new stuff can, within reasonable limits, be developed without any new hardware. So for all we know, there might be a life-altering service right around the corner – and one that can easily run on the high-end devices that we have today. For the next ten years or so, therefore, it’s the services that should bring the excitement and the change and the revolutions.

Whatever the new services will be, let’s hope they’ll be more useful than Facebook, which judging from all the hype seems to be the latest life-altering service ;-)

On an even more present-day note and speaking about services & applications, I’ve updated my list of favorite applications for the S60 Nokia devices.