Even really user-friendly and reliable stuff like iPhones still craps out or needs replacement for anyone to be comfortable implanting it surgically I think.
I do wonder if they’ll be more amenable to the 2035 version of Google Glass though.
Asking in 2020 what will replace the smartphone feels like asking in 1950 what will replace the motor car.
Augmented Reality contact lenses are the modern equivalent of 1950s predictions of nuclear-powered flying cars.
I don't think smartphones will really be replaced for forty years or more. It sounds like a long time but it really isn't. We've not come that far since the original iPhone. And that itself wasn't that much of a leap from various form factors five to ten years earlier - just a lot slicker in terms of UI. So phones will just get better. One can easily imagine the battery tech improving, perhaps practical rollable or foldable screens, lighter weight, etc. Fundamentally one wants something that easily fits in a pocket (current modern flagship phones are too large), provides a good display for interactive content and allows silent text and voice input.
I think cars, phones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers and TVs will all converge more in terms of control interfaces. There's plenty of evidence of this already with Android Auto in things like the new Polestar 2, the decline of custom TV software in favour of Android/Amazon's FireTV OS, etc. That's felt around the corner for years now, but feels like it might finally happen soon.
I still think smart-glasses has a chance to come back. If you think about it, combined with AR and hand-tracking, they can make everything that has a screen obsolete.
Your smart-glass will replace your TV, Laptop, Console, Watch, Camera, and of course Phone.
The tech was not ready for consumer glass yet going the business root will keep it alive. in 5 years it has a better camera processor and larger battery. Now I expect it to permeate into a consumer product organically in the next 10 years as the tech keeps improving and it is adopted for other stuff.
I would love to have something like this while watching sports in the stadium where I could see live stats. With 5G internet, machine learning/AI it is something that will be possible. Something that you see as the view of a robot in movies like terminator. By then most of the 20-25 year olds will be the facebook generation who have been monitored all their lives in different ways and wont have the same privacy concerns.
I assume a smartphone successor would involve wearables that make a palm-sized slab of glass in your pocket unnecessary. Don't really see that on the horizon but most people have only owned a smartphone for 10 years or so at this point so these technology shifts are over very short periods of time by historical standards.
Not yet, at least not at scale. The tech needs a few more years of advancements before it is mass adopted. The Apple glasses are cool, but nobody is going to regularly wear them in public (not least because of the risk of theft.)
If I had to take a guess what will replace the iPhone it will likely be new sci-fi tech that makes the cell into a piece of see through slab of glass that is touch based. If this is possible to do in the future, I think people will start buying that. Until then iPhone will reign supreme!
If it is not real good smart glasses, I have a hard time seeing anything else disrupting the phone. Basically because you have to display information and images.
Anything else can be a much cheaper peripheral that will be trivial to clone if it becomes popular.
Unless they are talking about a robot, which (1) rumor has it Apple is now and (2) a lot of companies want to build Rosie from Jetsons
Shifts in computing paradigms are incredibly rare. The smartphone is unlikely to be replaced for a long time to come. There will be plenty of head fakes along the way no doubt (smart speakers and voice bots come to mind), but the smartphone is simply too good and has too much utility to be easily challenged.
And you also have to make a bet that Apple won't come to dominate that area as well (even if they aren't first to it). AR glasses have some promise to be a new general purpose computing platform, but even then I'm skeptical that it will be able to mount a serious challenge to the smartphone.
All its going to take for the next paradigm shift will be for voice assistants and batteries to get better, and for google glass-like devices get so good that they match the feature set of smartphones and standalone VR systems and also become so small that they fit in a regular looking pair of sunglasses.
I'm not sure how long it will take, but it honestly seems inevitable.
Maybe it won't be glasses, but it will almost certainly be something we wear instead of a thing that we carry around forever.
I don't believe for a second that smartphones in their current black-mirror form is going to stay, maybe for the forseeable future, but I'll be surprised if we're still rubbing our greasy meat-sausages on glowing plates of glass 10 years from now.
My personal bet is that Google Glass is the Newton of wearable hardware. It's directionally correct, but way too early for the available hardware and the existing ecosystem, and too expensive as well.
As a happy owner of a Pebble, I definitely get the value of going beyond the phone screen. And as a sci-fi reader, I fully expect that everybody's going to end up spending 99% of their time intimately connected to tech (and the broader world via that tech). But I don't expect head-mounted UIs to be popular outside of tiny niches for 15 years, if ever.
I agree with your sentiment, but I think someone is going to figure out a device that does what a smartphones does, minus the "carry around" bit. And I don't think it'll take 50 years. Google glass wasn't it, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
We've kind of min/maxed the design of the smartphone at this point. It's at a physical minimum: a touchscreen and maybe a couple of buttons, but it's also at a utility maximum: you can do almost anything with a phone that you need to use a computer for.
What's next would be what comes after an advanced computer in your pocket. Logically, that must be either a wearable or an implantable device.
At some point, they stopped being phones and became extremely powerful all-purpose computing devices. What comes next?
I just wish alternate form factors of phones had gotten more attention. A plain glass rectangle is absolutely a local minimum of design, but I think it's very far from the best form factor.
For my money, I bet we're stuck with phones until implants become commonplace. There's just not that much else you can do with the 'computer in pocket' form factor
My only other thought is if we discover a reliable method for producing holograms. Then we'll probably see something similar in form to a phone, but which projects a full desktop computer environment, or whatever computing environment is appropriate for the task.
While I’m sure AR glasses are coming and will be popular, the notion that they’ll be so popular that smart phones won’t even have screens is particularly bold.
Smartphones didn’t replace PDAs, most people didn’t have a PDA to replace. Smart phones replaced whole categories of devices and bundled them into one: cameras, camera phones, PDAs, MP3 players, watches, timers, alarm clocks etc.
People keep looking for “the next big thing” and it just isn’t coming. The smartphone was a singular event in the history of computing and it wont be replicated within our lifetimes. At most it will be unbundled again, unevenly (eg, smart watches, and glasses)
I do wonder if they’ll be more amenable to the 2035 version of Google Glass though.
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