Imagine that a friendly spaceman left his home circa 1964, travelled 45 years into the future, and returned with news of how technology was being used in the future. On his return home, what would he report?
Thanks to a link in Stefan Constantine’s twitter stream this morning, we know one possible answer. Check it out!
No wonder the support staff were surprised. 
Now imagine that a similar experiment could be done today, except that we’re only interested in peering 5 more years into the future, rather than 45.
What are the things that users of mobile technology will be doing in 5 years time (2014), that would most surprise us? We’ll be interested to hear your views.
If the discussion uncovers attractive new possibilities that our planning hasn’t taken into account, then the Symbian Foundation community will surely start to revise its planning!
// David Wood
4 Comments
Smartphones are powerful little beasties already and I’m sure very soon they will replace our laptops.
We’ll store not just our data but install all our PC applications on them and carry them around with us where ever we go. When we get into the office our monitors, keyboard and mouse will all be Bluetooth connections and will just seamlessly connect to our mobiles.
MS Office 2014 for Symbian OS anyone
Surely you mean OpenOffice 2014
Personally, I’m keen to see what new sensors and inputs get added and what kind of cool stuff they may enable. So far we’ve got cameras, microphones, tilt-sensors, compass, proximity sensors, ambient light sensors and GPS. What next? Barometer and thermometer for DIY weather-forecasting (or even crowd-sourced weather monitoring if the data is published and gathered online?). Maybe a UV sensor to remind you to put on suncream? Heart-rate, body-fat and halitosis for health monitoring (actually that’s been done on Symbian already!)? What else?
Here’s another historical example of the kind of “surprise” in usage of technology that I’m trying to uncover.
As recounted in Claude Fischer’s fine 1992 book America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, the notion of using the (wired) telephone for social purposes (like gossip!) was originally disdained. These use cases were usually omitted from sales pitches. Because of shortage of bandwidth, people thought it was irresponsible to use the telephone for anything other than short calls to conduct business or make arrangements.
Over time, of course, as bandwidth became more widespread, ideas changed. According to the excerpt of Fischer’s book available at http://www.paulos.net/hcc/papers/america_calling.html, an officer of an Ohio telephone company wrote in 1905:
“When we started… the farmers thought that they could get along without telephones…. Now you couldn’t take them out. The women wouldn’t let you even if the men would. Socially, they have been a god-send. The women of the county keep in touch with each other, and with their social duties…”
It’s much the same with the reaction of the observers of the time-travelling friendly spaceman mentioned in the main posting. The observers are appalled that technology should be squandered on what seems to them as irresponsible frivolities.
How about the future? One possibility is that our smart mobile companion devices will be continually recording and analysing everything that they hear (including every conversation that we make). To us in 2009 this probably seems like a waste of resources. But in a bandwidth-rich 2014, this usage patterned could be viewed in a much more lenient light.
These “permanent life recorders” would open up lots of intriguing possibilities. For example, our smartphones could give advice to us, in quiet moments, and thereby act like our trusted confidant and advisor.
One thing that looks very likely for the future is the increased blurring of boundaries. We can already “timeshift” a lot of things we do (such as watch last night’s TV on the train on out mobile), and “placeshift” equally well (work from home or a random coffee shop using VPNs and remote communication tools). However I think one of the biggest changes is the ongoing merging of “work time” and “non-work time”.
Having mobile push email means that, in some ways, I’m already effectively always in the office. Likewise having my mobile with me and Skype or MSN installed on my work PC means that my outside-work social life can merge seamlessly with day job.
I see this increasing even more over the next few years until it is hard to where “work” ends and “non-work” begins and employees 40 hours a week is spread most effectively across a whole week. This is especially useful when working with colleagues spread round the whole globe.
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[...] Wood put an interesting post on the Symbian Foundation blog yesterday. He asked what the future of mobile technologies would be hold for the next 5 years. When [...]