Mobile future?(questionmark)
Back in the days (meaning 2008-beginning 2009) I predicted that in 2 years time our mobile connectivity would overtake our landlines. Now I can look back at that prediction and think that it wasn’t a bad guess, but it took a bit longer than I anticipated. For me it was a so clear and I lived it myself on my backpacker journey through Finland in 2008. I blogged, took all my photos, live streamed my experiences on Bambuser and was (almost) all the time connected during my journey. And that was with my Nokia N95, which I still consider to be a good communication device. Today we’re starting to be used to see people on the subway, bus or a train be using either a smartphone or an tablet.
My point being is that it’s NOT a mobile future. It’s already here! Now we’re living it, as an extended part of our self’s. Both for social interaction in every form as well for our everyday work. And for some it will be an addiction and for others just the extended arm into our social connections. For those ending up in addiction, and have to wake up in the middle of the night to check their facebook or twitter it of course will be a problem. But we humans get addicted to all kind of things, and there are cures for it.
Mobile(explonationmark)
Zooming in to the fact that we’re already here, and while reading the report by Mary Meeker in 2012 Internet trends so well showed that that we’re closing this fact. Here is a screenshot of the development in India as an example. I can strongly recommend you to read the whole report because it show how we have changed our behavior in many other ways.
We’re now NOT happy for waiting cycles however short they’re are.
Durance of units
4G connections also give us a much faster responsetimes, but the dilemma is still the too short batterytimes on many devices. On tablets it’s much better than on smart phones, now a lot of the development on mobile phones should be directed to find better solutions to power our units. Maybe water powered fuel cells combined with solar cells is one solution, or maybe our unit can get power from the surrounding magnetic fields? Whatever the solution it’s needed to happen NOW and not yesterday. The manufacturers have to take in to consideration that our units now more or less is connected 24/7.
Changing our behavior
For many of us as early adoptors we have adapted our lifestyle towards a transpancy never seen before, for many newbees this openness strikes as scaring and nothing they want to be a part of. Not even in generation X it seems like it’s something that they want to be a part of, at least from my own experience in some cases. But I think they will come around later on, and for us in the forefront it will continue to be a part of our lifestyle as well as our lifechoices.
Looking at myself, a good part of this article was written on my tablet (an Galaxy tab 10.1), and looking on how I use my different devices I can see the tablet is already taking more than half of my internet time. And in a longer perspective my guess is that I will send the larger screen on my desktop as well as the desktop to recycling pretty soon as my office is wherever I am now.
Continuing
Using my chrystalball I look into the future to see what we have coming: receiptfree shops where we pay with our phones and get the receipt in digital form using NFC, maybe we even when picking our merchandise register them on our device and then checkout in a cashier. This also opens for a possibility to have the phone connected to our fridge/freezer so we also have the basic supply upped. In the future Flowsociety there will be new business models applying to how we work, eat, live and play. There will be no need to have a certain address where you live, your device is also your address.
Internet of things around us will grown, even if don’t care about. Our apartments will be surveilled with cheap and secure equipment reachable from wherever in the world form our devices. Our cars (if we have one) will be connected via either satellites or wireless fast nets. Roaming will stop to exist, as it’s one of the most stupid forms of business models, open up the net for a reasonable cost and the providers will still earn loads of money.
Finally, I will gather my thoughts further down the path and give you my own insights later on in this blog.
