Next Level Gadgets and Technologies

In few years, the concept of a smartphone will change dramatically. Just look at the last half-decade. Since 2005, the Apple iPhone emerged as a cannibalizing platform, made for loading innovative apps, designed with finger-flicking ease-of-use in mind. The rumored Google Phone not only came out in the form of a new operating system, but the actual Nexus One as well. Accelerometers, touchscreens, GPS-based location awareness – these have also all appeared in full force in the last few years and changed the market entirely.


(1) PC Replacement



The primary change will occur over the next few years as smartphones start behaving more and more like laptops. In June, DoCoMo started offering the Toshiba T-01A in Japan, a super-fast phone that uses an advanced Qualcomm chip. With these fast processors, smartphones will finally run full-blown apps such as Adobe Photoshop – and not just with the limited features offered in the current Photoshop app. There are already signs of other forthcoming power apps on the horizon as well, including tools that can handle photographic effects and process large, high-res images and videos.

Nokia recently launched the N900, which it calls a mobile computer. It runs a Linux operating system and can multitask like a MacBook. In 2015, these powerful laptop replacements will provide true multitasking where you can run Spotify to stream audio, chat over an IM client, process EXIF data for a massive photo collection, and even play World of Warcraft all at the same time. These uber-phones will have similar-size displays and use touch input, but the background processing will be much more advanced and allow full PC-like capabilities


(2) Gaming Experience



Gaming exploded in 2009 – especially with fantastic shooters such as Alive-4ever on the iPhone, with gameplay and graphics that look like something you’d see on Xbox 360 (granted, as a casual game). Yet, these games also point to a trend where mobile gaming gets much more graphical (like the jump from PS2 to PS3) and gamers will be able to connect with each other for multiplayer shootouts, albeit with not just one or two players, but rather a roomful of 32 gamers all at once.

Moreover, with faster processors and faster carrier service (not to mention faster Wi-Fi), gamers will be able to connect for an experience that is more like the recently released Uncharted 2: Among Thieves where a multiplayer match involves high-resolution graphics, co-operative play with two players on screen at the same time, incredibly fluid gameplay mechanics, and much more realistic console-like sound. At the heart of this new technology: Faster networks and ubiquitous connections for anytime gaming with anyone.

"The chips running the device will be highly efficient,” says Jackson. "Like today, your phone will have sufficient memory to store oodles of information, but it will also be connected to the Internet in an ambient way through whatever network makes the most sense (WiFi, cellular… even peer-to-peer possibly)


(3) Wireless Apple Laptops



Just as a Prius is powered by a combination of gasoline and electricity, the MacBook Eco will stay running with a mashup of technologies that includes solar energy, piezoelectric power, and wireless electricity.

First off, its black coating isn’t just for aesthetics. That’s solar paint, a multilayered mixture of nano-sized dye-sensitive cells and titanium dioxide that can coat any material, going on like paint and drying as tiny—think microscopic—solar cells. Even in 2010, it can harness more of the sun’s energy (up to 40 percent) than traditional photovoltaic cells (closer to 18 percent). That performance also comesat a lower cost, according to NextGen Solar, the startup bringing this technology to market. You can’t just waltz down to Lowe’s and pick up a gallon today, but imagine what could happen if a huge buyer like Apple got on board. Plus, since this paint works on so many surfaces-even windows-Apple won’t have to restrict its creative industrial design.

Of course, computer use usually happens indoors, so solar probably won’t be enough for anyone except maybe Tarzan. But the highly portable MacBook Eco will also use kinetic energy harvested by your footsteps, courtesy of piezoelectric pads on the bottom of a pair of Nike Piezo cross-trainers.

Don’t worry about an ugly 20th-century wire tethering your shoes to your Mac. The Eco will use wireless charging, which will beam the power harvested in your shoes up to your MacBook by converting the electricity to radio waves and transmitting them by RF. A handy graph on the screen shows you at a glance how much of your juice is coming from each source, letting you
combine technologies to keep your hybrid MacBook Eco cruising down the information superhighway.


(4) Connected World



The dream of fully connected, location-aware devices will finally come to fruition. This is more than just a simple Bluetooth dump between business phones, but a full data exchange – say, sending all your favorite apps over Wi-Fi to another smartphone, as well as every movie you have ever download, and all of your music.

"Your phone is likely to be situationally and contextually aware, and present information to you accordingly,” says John Jackson, a vice president of research at CCS Insight. "The phone — and the cloud-based server side intelligence behind it — will know you, your location, your social networks, and your preferences in food, media, and communication. It will predict your next moves. The multi-trillion dollar question is who enables it and controls the sources and uses of information.”

Location awareness will further lead to several other innovations. Phones in 2015 will know when you are near a McDonald’s or Starbucks and offer to pay your bill. Augmented reality – an emerging trend in 2009 – will become a social-awareness tool in the next five years as users link their phones. For example, connected devices could form into an ad hoc broadcast terminal at sporting events where you can view a video feed from a guy in the second row or up in the nose-bleed seats.


(5)Force Field



Whether they're to protect the hull of some intergalactic ship or to erect around an individual for personal protection, there's no way we'll be looking at these things in 5 years' time. The only developments at the moment here are from one or two academic groups experimenting with plasma field shielding by using super-charged wire meshes.

The theory is that these will be able to deflect matter from passing through, which sounds very useful indeed. Whether they're going to either work or require impossible amounts of energy or not is another question, but the applications beyond could be lots and lots of fun - perhaps eventually some sort of extreme zorbing at the very least.


(6) Advanced Social Networking



The Palm Pre and Motorola Droid showed how to aggregate social networking – you can add accounts and view contact info and e-mails in one thread. This multi-service aggregation is just the first step in the smartphone’s coming evolution, however. In 2015, there will be no need to use Facebook on a computer anymore, because your connections will occur in real-time when you meet people in person, swapping contact info, photos, and even personal details (like who you are dating or what you plan to do later that night) in an instant.

This kind of socially-aware service will work like the Poken  in that itwon’t require a lot of user interaction -just enter into an area where someone is actively sharing their Facebook profile or Twitter status and thephones (using a newly emerged networking standard) will swap data even between devices from different manufacturers and on different carriers.

Consumer analyst Michael Gartenberg says this social integration will spawn entirely new services and features on smartphones in 2015. For example, once everyone is easily connected through a smartphone portal, you can walk into a room and search for people who like soccer or Peter Jackson films. New marketing paradigms will emerge as well as companies sell their wares to a target audience. This Minority Report-style marketing will explode, offering services and deals to customers as they walk into Starbucks based on a specific purchase history.


(7) Space-Space



It was predicted some time in the late 70s that the 2020 Olympics would be taking place on the Moon on our lunar colony. As it goes, it's going to be in Rio de Janeiro. Exotic but not the same.Our increasing thirst for crippling the environment could be the necessity that mothers this invention, but there's an equally good chance that it'll work out easier just to take care of the planet we're on already. All the same, people will still look to the stars and wonder about whether terraforming or living life under plexiglass domes with atmospheres pumped inside is viable, and there's no major reason why this won't happen.

Consumer space travel is very nearly here and it'll undoubtedly be commonplace within 40 years,so the next logical step might well be to set up places for space tourists to stop off or visit while out there - as well as house scientists working on all sorts of extra terrestrial matters and hopefully blowing our minds and theories in the process. But we digress.Space station technology is already the beginnings of this kind of stuff, so the equipment largely seems to be in place already. Whether NASA will have some deep sea/underground working model by 2015 is another thing.


(8) Cloner



Perversely, probably the single most important invention on this list is the one where there appears to be the least work at the moment. Machines which could not only create vital substances - like fresh water, food or fuels - but also recycle old and useless matter at the same time, would be the kind of magic wand to solve mankind's problems for good.In practical terms, the closestreally anyone has got is with the work on nanotechnology, but getting tiny bots to make things for us isn'tquite the same as having matter transformed from one object to another on demand.

Some of the key problems are, firstly, down to what level of detail would weneed to copy things - ie: molecular, atomic, sub-atomic - for them to serve effectively the same purpose as the object we're looking to copy? Secondly, how much energy would it take to do this? thirdly, it would require quite an in-depth knowledge of complex structures of just about everything you're looking to make. Fourthly, messing round with creating atoms is potentially quite explosive.

Probably the closest we've got to the cloner at the moment is 3D printing. These machines realise complicated computer designs into genuine real world objects by placing down layer upon layer of detail of any given substrate material. So, in many ways, the concept is already working. Bring the sophistication of the computer plans down to the atomic level and provide cartridges of elements and you're there, but that's the kind of fine tuning that would take several teams many, many lifetimes to complete, even if we ignore the expense and slew of unforeseen issues.

The good news though is that we'd only need to make one of them. Once we'd got it right, we could just turn it on and get it to make copies of itself.And what is the ultimate conclusion? Once these faster, more location-aware, service oriented phones emerge, the PC will quickly become secondary. As such, the smartphone of 2015 and beyond won’t just be an essential traveling companion - it may be your one-stop connection to the computing world at large.


(9) Time Machine



This one isn't just an essay, a thesis or area of study. It's a bound and printed collection of encyclopaedia full of writings, films and conversation that would stretch off toward the sun.Time travel into the future is probably an easier one to make real than travelling back into the past. According to Einstein, all you need to do is accelerate an object beyond the speed of light.The trouble is, it would take an infinite amount of energy to do so and that's a rather tricky figure to achieve. In fact, it basically indicates that time travel is only theoretically possible and could never actually happen.As for going back into the past, well, that's even trickier but, rather than getting into the physics, which, again, we wouldn't pretend to understand, the fact that we haven't met any time travellers from the future at any point in our history rather indicates that it's not and never will be possible. That said, they could be superbly good at keeping themselves secret and there is a theory that there could be a point beyond which time travel becomes possible because of a
physical change to the universe - a point which it's impossible to travel back beyond..