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A truly dizzing predictions of the future of mobile from Tomi Ahonen on Communities Dominate Brands… I was getting quite excited by 2010 what with a 3.5G phone with a 5 Megapixel optical zoom cameraphone with WiFi type speeds and built-in TV tuners, and a gigabyte size hard drive (like today’s i-Pods). The smallest phones are the size of a thick credit card.

But that’s barely scratching the surface. Tomi buffs up the crystal ball and this is what he sees for 2020 and 2025:

By 2020 the personal secretary function evolves into a personality synthesizer - ie there will be software on my phone, that when you call it, you don’t even know that you did not talk to me, you talked to my phone, which then makes necessary adjustments to my calendar, informs me briefly what was talked about etc. And the translator? by 2020 the bugs are fixed, and we have real-time translation, any language to any language.

By 2020 all payments go directly to the mobile phone account (ie it is the same as our bank account and our credit card account). We pay all relevant payments by mobile phone, from taxes to rents to monthly car payments etc. Most daily newspapers have stopped printing paper versions. Music CDs and movie DVDs are no longer made. And the “free” non-Mobile phone based “old-fashioned” internet has all but vanished.

Finally in 2025 we have the 5G phone. It is totally unfair to call this a phone and it certainly won’t be called that. The form factor is more like a sugar cube or less, can easily be built into a ring for example. People will have these communication devices built into the body, into perhaps a tooth etc., With multi-multi terabyte hard drives these “phones” can ship with all the worlds’ movies, or all the world’s TV shows, or all the worlds’ existing videogames, etc already preloaded, depending on what is your preference of entertainment. And of course mainstream phones come with the top 1000 fave movies, TV shows, videogames AND all existing music preloaded.

I am not sure that the phone will become the device of the future although it makes sense on many levels. However, this is Tomi’s territory and I look forward to more of his insights. In order to appreciate the journey and it isn’t just the path of the mobile phone development but many other media and communication read the whole thing.