Cell phones…the future of computing???

It was just another day at the coffee shop.  I grabbed a double cap, an almond scone and sat down to work.  I put down a little stand on table and rested my iPhone 8 on it.  I pressed a small button the side and suddenly a tiny laser projected a virtual keyboard onto the table in front of me.  I reached up, and pressed a small button on the side of my glasses activating the built in projection system to generate a 42″ display (virtually of course) about 2 feet in front of me.  Then, I taped the side of a ring I wore and reached up.  The cursor appeared on the screen and I selected the menu bar at the bottom.   From that point forward, it was no different from using a regular computer.   

Sound far fetched.  Everything I mentioned here, save for the iPhone 8, actually exists.  

RING – This is amazing idea.  It’s a ring you wear on your finger that has bluetooth built in and is able to track the motion of your hand.  You can use it as a mouse, you can use it to control and change channels on your TV, you can even sign things with it.  The fact that’s it’s an unobtrusive ring makes it ideal

Glasses that project screen in field of vision  – We’re all familiar with Google Glasses, but there are a number of competitors working on the same kind of technology.   Of course, Apple is supposedly developing iGlasses itself.  The difference is that many are not standalone devices like Googles.  Instead, they take the display of the computer, tablet, or phone, and project it in front of the wearer.  Personally, I think this is a much better approach.  Instead of having to use very limited display and processing technology due to the small size (such as Googles), these rely on the power of the device they are projecting.  

Projecting Keyboard  – A company named Celluon already produces a tiny box that will project a keyboard onto your table that you can use instead of a physical one.  You can get this at Amazon for about $110 and considering there are cell phones that have built in video projectors (Samsong came out with the Galaxy VideoBeam in 2012), this would be an easy addition to any phone.

The processing power built into a current smart phone may not compare with a fire-breathing game laptop, but it’s a quantum leap past desktop systems of only a few years ago.  I predict that, once manufacturers are willing to design phones to rely upon external devices for display input, you’ll see the demand for serious processing power (both CPU and graphics) will increase.  Additionally,as nano-technology progresses, and the speed with which we can access the cloud reachs a point comparable to a standard hard drive, or even RAM you’ll see the demand for even laptops drop.  As Apple’s IOS bears much in common with OSX, and you can easily run Linux on a cell phone (in fact, there was a server built back in the 1990s that was the size of small matchbox), you’ll start seeing true operating systems ported over.  Cloud storage offers another benefit, namely that your data is stored SECURELY online.  Should the phone be stolen,  it would be useless as everything it needs to even run could be stored online and this connection would only be established using some form of biometric such as finger print, voice ID, or even retina scan (through the phone).

The bottom line, in my opion is this.  In the not distant future (I’m talking may 3 or 4), there will be no need to the size of even a laptop accept in special situations.    Of course, all this would only be stop gap until nueral implant technology becomes universally available .  Then, you won’t even need the phone as it’ll be already in your head.  But, that’s another story.