As I left the Mobile World Congress, I couldn't help but think about where mobile devices are going in the future. Today's devices are pretty amazing themselves, but the phones we're likely to see over the next couple of years should take things to a whole new level.
The phone of the future will be a smartphone: That much we know for sure. Today, only about one in six phones sold fit into what analysts call the “smartphone" category, but that percentage is growing rapidly, especially in places such as the U.S. Much of what is now in a high-end phone will migrate to mid-range phones over the next couple of years, although there will probably be a market for very simple low-end phones for a long time to come.
The application processors that run these phones are getting notably faster, and we are beginning to see multi-core versions of these processors as well. Tomorrow's smartphones should be able to run most of the applications we run on PCs today--if we want to.
But one question is how much processing will actually be done on the phone, and how much will be done on back-end servers, with the network just moving the results back and forth. Indeed, most of the advanced applications Google showed at the conference relied on the complex processing being done in the cloud, not on the handset.
It's not just the applications processor that's getting more powerful: So are the other chips that make up a phone.
At CES, I saw a demo of Broadcom's Video Core IV chip, which supports 1080p recording and playback, and includes support for a digital camera sensor of up to 20 megapixels (not that anyone really makes a sensor of that density for a cell phone, or that it would make sense). This is designed to be a coprocessor that works with a baseband or applications processor to give a phone more graphics and video power.
At Mobile World Congress, Robert Rango of the company's wireless connectivity group talked about Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), for tasks such as health tracking and fitness, as well as a new low-power chips that combines Bluetooth, GPS, and FM functionality. But he mostly focused on how combining Wi-Fi and Bluetooth would be important in the future, because for many smartphones, Wi-FI connectivity is as important as 3G because the wide area broadband networks are getting so overloaded.
Other companies are doing similar things. Texas Instruments announced a single chip that does Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and FM radio reception.
The phone of the future will be a smartphone: That much we know for sure. Today, only about one in six phones sold fit into what analysts call the “smartphone" category, but that percentage is growing rapidly, especially in places such as the U.S. Much of what is now in a high-end phone will migrate to mid-range phones over the next couple of years, although there will probably be a market for very simple low-end phones for a long time to come.
The application processors that run these phones are getting notably faster, and we are beginning to see multi-core versions of these processors as well. Tomorrow's smartphones should be able to run most of the applications we run on PCs today--if we want to.
But one question is how much processing will actually be done on the phone, and how much will be done on back-end servers, with the network just moving the results back and forth. Indeed, most of the advanced applications Google showed at the conference relied on the complex processing being done in the cloud, not on the handset.
It's not just the applications processor that's getting more powerful: So are the other chips that make up a phone.
At CES, I saw a demo of Broadcom's Video Core IV chip, which supports 1080p recording and playback, and includes support for a digital camera sensor of up to 20 megapixels (not that anyone really makes a sensor of that density for a cell phone, or that it would make sense). This is designed to be a coprocessor that works with a baseband or applications processor to give a phone more graphics and video power.
At Mobile World Congress, Robert Rango of the company's wireless connectivity group talked about Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), for tasks such as health tracking and fitness, as well as a new low-power chips that combines Bluetooth, GPS, and FM functionality. But he mostly focused on how combining Wi-Fi and Bluetooth would be important in the future, because for many smartphones, Wi-FI connectivity is as important as 3G because the wide area broadband networks are getting so overloaded.
Other companies are doing similar things. Texas Instruments announced a single chip that does Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and FM radio reception.
