Mobile phones five years from now

According to Adaptive-Path, a user-experience and design-consulting firm, mobile phones in five years time are likely respond to voice commands & gestures (as well as touch – iPhone style touch that is). They will look like  a “piece of metal and plastic with a few grooves in it and little more [and will] mimic the touch, sight, gesture and auditory feeds that we use to interact with our environment”. So sensible!

Check out the detail in the Wired gadgets blog.

So, no more buttons. Yes folks, hold off those plans to get txting-friendly plastic surgery for your hands. Enabling technologies include haptics, advanced speech recognition and motion sensors.

Other neat features include integrated GPS and camera functionality to provide image-recognition and bring up information about the object the camera points to. We’re talking information-empowered consumers here.

The article has some interesting background to the development of predictive input that cuts down on a lot of thumb-twiddling. Turns out that Cliff Kushler, one of the guys who invented the predictive-text input system, started out with the intent of making it easier for disabled people to interact with their phones. Cliff’s latest venture is Swype (no, I did not mis-spell that). Swype allows users to draw a line under the selected letters on an onscreen QWERTY keypad rather than tapping on a touchscreen keypad. It works faster.

The article concludes with an astute observation: that the changes outlined are likely to be introduced incrementally rather than shocking consumers with too much change at once; and the technology to enable the phone in five years time is already present. The change will be in “looking at how to put those bits together in different ways to create innovative solutions”.