By 2020, it can be expected that most of the world’s population will have not just a mobile phone, but a Smartphone connected to a mobile broadband network. These devices will have unprecedented context awareness and ability to communicate, as well as radically different user interface technology to what we currently are used to.

These devices will know the user’s location and speed, presence (whether occupied or not), route and intentions (through her diary and other information activities such as Mobile Internet browsing that she has recently been doing), and bio-state (through wirelessly connected sensors worn on her person). They will also know the state of the environment around the user and on her path, whether she is on the road, rail, walking or inside, through various Internet data sources which will provide real-time (zero latency) information from networks of connected devices across the world. Finally, crowd sourced data will provide real-time (again, zero latency) knowledge about what other people are doing (e.g. the queues at the airport, or the traffic on the road).

New screen technologies (such as wearable displays) will allow the “always on you” handset to have a big screen experience. Input technologies such as gesture, speech and possibly thought will complement the touch experience to ensure that it is easy to give instructions to the handset whatever you are doing.

These devices will be supported by high speed mobile networks (true 4G offering pedestrian speeds in excess of 1Gbps) and hence will be able to draw on what will be extensive cloud computing capability by 2020. No information will be unreachable for anyone in range!

With this unprecedented technology capability in our pocket, there is potential to supplement human intelligence and provide support for cognitive tasks that the user normally struggles with while they are “on the run”. We can encapsulate this with a vision for the future whereby people permanently record everything they see and hear via a microscopic camera and microphone that is always on their person. This information is transmitted via their phones and the 4G mobile networks to cloud storage, where it is instantly recallable by the user. For example, you may see someone walking down the street and you can’t recall his name. The facial image is sent from your camera to a cloud service that does facial recognition, recalls the information about who the person is, where you met, the personal details they have made public from their Facebook page and displays all this information to you via a heads up display in your glasses.

In order to realise this vision we need to overcome some key technological barriers. At present, the volume of data on mobile broadband networks is growing exponentially, but spectral efficiency is only improving linearly. For future traffic volumes to be viable, traffic management technology will need to be introduced. Spectrum in the mobile environment is also a problem and more and more bands are being used for each new technology in order to try and find those precious additional Hertz. Will Software Defined Radios become available that enable handsets to cope with upwards of a dozen radio technologies and bands? In addition, as we expect the devices in our pocket to have greater functionality, more frequently and each with more processing, battery life is a significant limitation. Today’s smartphones do not have enough battery life for an average day when used intensively. New portable power solutions are required, and these will probably need to be a combination of new battery technologies and power scavenging solutions to provide usable battery life.

As we move into 2020 and beyond, I confidently predict that the current proliferation in the number of device form factors will not have diminished. The “Swiss Army Knife” of mobile devices is an attractive idea but it does not exist, as the role different devices play is determined not by the mobile technology but by other functions. For example, a camera is no longer a device for taking pictures, but is becoming an optical lens with some removable storage attached.

One area where I do believe unification will occur is in the use of the public network as a single infrastructure to serve all functions, including public safety agencies, sensor networks, dispatch networks, etc. The economies of scale are just too compelling for this not to happen.

We have already made considerable progress in terms of cloud services, context-based services and augmented reality services in the mobile environment. We expect to see these continue to grow in importance to enable new and compelling mobile services for all aspects of our lives – entertainment, shopping, health care, intelligent transport systems and others. We also expect to see mobile devices become part of a rich video interconnection environment where seeing people becomes as easy and natural as talking to them.

In the end, however, while we can predict technology progress fairly accurately, in order to succeed, we also need to foresee human behaviour and that is the great unknown. Who would have predicted the popularity of SMS when it was put into the GSM standard more than 20 years ago?

Any thoughts on the future and technology you’d like to share with us?