Today , nearly eight in 10 Americans own a smartphone , and we ’ve become accustomed to using them for everything from listen to music , take pictures , learn news and send on social medium to shopping and making fiscal minutes . For many people , smartphones have taken the position of once unwashed daily implements like taping measuring , flashlight and wristwatches .
Smartphones have transform unremarkable animation so much that it ’s easy to block that they only became popular a little more than 10 years ago . That ’s when Applereleased the iPhone , which combined mobile internet access and computing power with a multi - touch screen interface , urinate it potential to do somewhat much everything by tip , flicking and tweet with your pollex and forefinger . A late survey discover that smartphone users now spendabout five hour a dayusing their gadget , which is why it ’s sturdy to walk down a crowded pavement in any major city without bumping into someone settle on upon his or her smartphone screen .
But with technical progress moving at broadband velocity these days , it ’s strange to call up that the smartphone as we know it has a modified life sentence anticipation . A2015 surveyof smartphone exploiter across the world by Swedish communication engineering and services company Ericsson found that one in two expected that the smartphone would become obsolete by 2020 .
Which leads to the prominent question : What ’s going to replace the smartphone ? Prognosticators predict that shape up in technologies such asvirtual realness , augment reality , artificial intelligenceandwearableelectronics will breed a novel generation of devices that could change our everyday existence even more than the smartphone did .
" The transition we ’re about to experience is that we ’re die to go from get at the internet to dwell in the net , " explainsJack Uldrich , a futurist , author and speaker who helps business people figure out how to empathize and benefit from emerging trends .
We do n’t yet have a suitably zeitgeist - y name for those gadgets , but it ’s a pretty safe bet that they wo n’t be palm - sized rectangle with glass screens — or any screen at all , for that matter . And they may not even be a single gizmo . Brad Berens , principal strategy officer for theCenter for the Digital Futureat the University of Southern California ’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism , predicts that the smartphone will give room topersonal area electronic web — clusters of lilliputian appliance hide in string of beads in a necklace , or work up into eyeglass or contact lenses .
Such devices will use VR and AR to fancy information into our field of vision , extinguish the motivation for a screen . And just as we control apps on today ’s smartphones by moving our fingers , we ’ll be able to pull strings our next - generation personal field net through part bid or by gesturing in the air — perhaps with the help of haptic engineering thatsimulates the sensory feedback of touchingactual objects . Typing may not ever become a completely out accomplishment , but it may someday become as rare as , say , someone who writes in elegant cursive with a outflow pen .
" Just as I ca n’t typecast as tight as my kids , they wo n’t be able-bodied to do the haptic gesture of the future as fast as the kindergarteners of today eventually will be able-bodied to do , " Uldrich says .
Next Generation Intelligent Assistants
But increasingly , we wo n’t have to input as much information as we once did , because next - coevals well-informed helper — reckon a vastly more intuitive adaptation of Siri , Alexa or Cortana — will learn to figure out what we need to know or do , sometimes before we realize it ourselves . Uldrich prognosticate that in the near futurity , our personal gadgetry will read our eye movements to make predictions . " If we stare at something for two sec , it will tell that we need more information about it , " he says .
Berens envisions that the intelligent assistants of the future continually will whisper in our ears and project messages that only we can see . That might avail us in a lot of way — if we encounter a person and ca n’t echo his or her name , for example , " It ’s John Smith " may flash before our center to cue us .
It ’s also imaginable that our succeeding gadget ' thinking help eventually may interact with other intelligent help , possibly adopt the home of some of our interaction with actual people . That ’s a prospect that Berens finds both interesting and troubling .
" We ’ve already seen people using digital engineering to avoid straight interact with some people while interact more with other people , " he says . " On the bus or tube , hoi polloi play with their phones or deal with far - flung people via social spiritualist rather than gossip with the person next to them . Teenagers prefer texting to spill on the earphone . Dating apps like Tinder make it easier to meet people without the awkward need to gather up your courage to near a stranger . "
" Some of this is good , but it also means that multitude can increasingly last in their own little universe , inside what authorEli Pariserhas dubbed ' filter bubbles , ' where you do n’t require to recognize that there are other points of view about affair , " Berens says .
But next - generation personal communication devices may also change us in other way that we have n’t yet project . As with the smartphone , we ’ll have to start using them to find out .
