Future of smart mobile devices: “phones & tablet”

In ever evolving smart world around us, what’s the future hold for us or what we are building for our future in mobile world. In recent times, two main words “Modularity and Flexibility” have been doing rounds in the smart mobile world. Every big shark in the smart mobile world is working towards these two forms. So can we assume that day is around the corner when we flex the rules of physics.

However for that we need to understand the terms “Modularity and Flexibility” first:

The term Modularity in mobile world stand’s for making a device with independent different components. Modular is something where all the parts can be removed or replaced even the necessary ones. Modular is not a new word in tech world, as we know we change or replace parts in desktops from the very start. Like we can replace different parts like ram, CPU, boards, etc.

And this also means we can even upgrade our device, one piece at a time at our own will. That means we don’t need to wait until it’s broken or something.

So this means modular is not a new stuff but for mobile devices we have that of until now. So how will modularity actually works in case of smart phones, just think if your current smartphone is becoming slow day by day and instead of buying a whole new phone you can buy an upgraded CPU module and replace it with CPU installed on your phone. Just swap the parts in and out of the device.

Around the world millions of devices gets thrown away daily just because some part of the device is broken or making the device weaker as compare with the competition, in these devices rest of the parts are good to go or work with upgraded parts. This making the mobile’s the largest contributors in e-waste around the world.

So what’s the solution? The answer is a block phone: i.e. phone which is developed with detachable blocks, all of them are connected with a base and the base connects everything together. So if your phone is getting slow, you can replace the block/part which affect phone speed with the upgraded one and rest of the phone will work like before. Or in case if something gets broken like screen, you can change it by yourself or even upgrade it with new technology consists screen. For example, from HD to Full HD.

And the best thing about this is you can even customize your phone according to your needs. Let’s say you save all your data on cloud this means you don’t need external space on your device, but you need bigger battery. Simply you can swap your external storage component with a battery.

Two/Three years back there was noise about Modularity in the tech world with the name Project Aura. A company showcased a dummy or under research phone in which user can swap camera and battery modules.

More on this, few months back a major mainstream company LG launched a semi-modular phone LG-G5, in which user can upgrade or increase battery anytime without any hassle.

And the recently launched Motorola Z & Z force phones with snap mods like “Projector, external speakers, bigger battery, etc” confirms that all the major companies are now going in same direction to make phone’s modular as much as possible.

Flexibility stands for the opposite of Rigid in general. This means any object or material, which can change shape or state without breaking. Now the question is how this “Flexibility” related to smart phones. Right now, we can see around ourselves people using multiple smart devices  for doing one same job like using “smart mobile phone with smart watch” just to cut short our little human effort. But the bargain for this is we need to carry to different devices. If i say how cool it will be to use one device for same stuff in different environment with different state of smart device. How about if we can bend our mobile device and wrap it on our wrist to use it as smart watch. That will be really awesome.

In this same direction major, companies are RnD in their own ways to implement “Flexibility” in the near future devices. Just few months back at Lenovo tech world 2016, behind-the-scenes Lenovo showcased their approach towards foldable or flexible devices. They brought along two concepts: one as mobile phone device and the other one was a tablet.

First the mobile phone, They presented a phone which we can wear on our wrist just by strapping it on screen of the device will flex and make a curve according to your wrist to hold onto your wrist.

The second was the Tablet which you can bend and fold from the center of the screen and use it as a Phablet. To make it more handy in crunch situation and also increasing the use of tablet by  making it more user friendly in situation like “calling and messaging.”

However, all these stuff are still prototypes and there is still long way to go to make accessible these features to the masses. But  surely we are growing and moving in right direction of innovation and doing reduction in use of  resources.