It's surprising to see the evolution of mobile phones and the corresponding usage pattern of users. Right when it was on the anvil who could have foreseen the force with which it would upend everything. The need for communication and comraderie was always present in human beings, but so was the need to put a name or face behind it. The world was small afterall, an oyster, for most of the normal human beings. But the pace of technological change and the advent of globalisation created a powerful new economy as well as age, that was to seriously challange the old way of life. Add the current social media into the mix and one has a fundamentally new way of life.
Right when Motorola came out with Iridium phones and had to bear the brunt, or when nokia came out with hugely successful models, to when the call rates dropped and brought a new means (always on, always connected) of communication to the masses, to the age of data services, when data is becoming more important day by day; no one has been able to clearly predict the pace of happenings.
Feature phones have taken a back seat now, with new touch screen smartphones the new currency in the scheme of things. The new 24*7 culture has the perfect tool in telecommunications revolution. Add to it the GPS, by which you are never lost, and never out of place, and the online translation/discovery services, with seamless travel arrangements, and suddenly the world seems a smaller place. So much information is at hand, that it requires an extraordinary mind to cull the right information in a timely fashion.
Who would have thought that large screen phones would come into being, that phablets and tablets would become a new screen, and the most important at that. That information would be the new currency. When ownership would be immaterial, timely usage would be what everyone would be paying for. Things would come in sachets. True you don't need a powerplant for enjoying electricity and the gift it brings, but the concept would boil over to other areas, atleast that has been a revelation.
What would the future of mobile devices be? Cloud is where a major part of our online lives are stored..How pervasive is it going to be? How would we interact with the future devices? Is there life after data?
Will the future be wearable devices? Or will we be with an implanted supercomputer in our brain, always online, always connected to the master supercomputer that is the internet now? A tantalising future indeed. How's it gonna be?
