— The Nike phone will come embedded in a nifty waterproof jacket. Most versions will have you talking through your sleeve. A satellite-phone version will have you talking through your shoe (à la television spy Maxwell Smart). The wet-suit version will feature underwater connectivity allowing you to stay in contact while snorkeling in Kauai.
— Toshiba and Hitachi will finally release hydrogen-fuel cell batteries in ordinary phones. Talk time will rise to days, not hours. Combined with advances in organic solar-cell technology being developed at Princeton University and by DARPA (the people who brought you the Internet), portable devices will just keep on ticking, much like those old solar calculators from the early ’90s still kicking around.
Five years out
— The Sanyo camera will shoot HD video and feature a full editing suite inside the device. You can shoot footage on your handheld and zip it to IFC.com in the same day. Send handmade movies to other phones or nearby TV screens via ultrawide-spread spectrum wireless.
— NASA begins licensing radioisotope-thermoelectric-generator (RTG) batteries like those used to power the Cassini spacecraft. The first consumer product: a nuclear cell-phone battery that offers months of talk time, not days.
— Bio-interactive phones are used to monitor and adjust pharmaceutical dosages in real time. A ZigBee personal network swaps data between the handset and devices such as pacemakers and insulin pumps.
— NTT DoCoMo releases wristwatch-style phones featuring FingerWhisper technology that uses the bones of the human hand as the telephone receiver and as virtual-keyboard input sensors. The user inserts one finger in the ear, and a microphone attached to the wrist unit picks up vocal input. Button presses are initiated by tapping the fingers in a pattern on just about any surface.
15 to 20 years out
— Cell phone? What’s a cell phone? Bio-electronics (a fledgling science back in 2006, when scientists at the University of Nebraska coated bacteria with gold) makes great strides, junking the portable hardware people have gotten sick of carrying around. The new trend is to build the peripherals right into the human body.
— Using 2006 research from Panasonic’s Nanotechnology Research Laboratory, a cell-phone manufacturer releases the first phone that runs off your body’s own electricity from metabolizing food. Delighted users of the Slimfast-embedded phone boast that the more they talk, the skinnier they get.
— All portable telecommunications and multimedia devices are merged into the “thumb chip,” a microscopic device implanted under the thumbnail that substitutes the ringer with an unobtrusive tingling sensation.
— Braingate, a technology originally developed at Brown University to allow the disabled to control computers by brainpower, is adapted to all manner of electronics controls for the broader consumer market. There’s no more receiver or speakerphone: it’s all integrated directly into the audio-visual cortices of the brain. Simply “think” the phone into talk mode, and you can carry on a conversation without opening your mouth. “Hands-free” gives way to “mouth-free.”
