原创 My mobile device gets even more personal

Steve Jobs, and most of the world’s population didn’t know then, and may not know now how extraordinarily powerful, useful, and essential the smartphone of 2016 is going to be.

 

That’s the good news. The bad news is that less sophisticated marketing types, looking for the sound bites to excite the news tonight, will declare inaccurate heights, and in some cases give consumers the frights. Smartphones are going to seem intelligent, but they will not be thinking machines, just very, very well-trained, adaptive, and adaptable devices with multi-sensor inputs.

 

As a result of the digestion of hordes of data collected by the device and other sources, processed on the device, and sorted in the device and/or the cloud, our personal companions are going to appear to be intuitive. The result will be better experiences and interactions with our devices and the world at large.

 

The goal of the device builders and their processor and application suppliers is to bring a more human-like understanding to the device so we users are not aware that we are dealing with a machine, as I am fond of saying, the technology works when it disappears.

 

When we can teach our devices to respond to us, in a manner we prefer, which will be different for each and every user, we’ll have a human-like relationship. But as long as the device and apps have to train us on how to deal with them, it’s still just an annoying machine that heats up our pockets and frustrates us as we try to deal with it while dealing with three other things simultaneously.

 

The device builders and their suppliers understand this and are taking steps to improve the situation, and they are working at warp speed — you are going to be amazed at the development over the next 18 months.

Feeling secure
One of the major components of those developments will be better personal security. The smartphone of 2016 will have twice the local memory of today’s devices, and more than twice the capacity for plug in memory.

 

The memory will be faster, and use less power. That’s item one in the improved security — keep your stuff locally, and privately. The industry emphasizes the need for more processing on the cloud and ignores the need for on-device processing, our future smartphones will do more and store more locally.

 

The access to the local data will be biologically unique, with multifactor biometric authentication, including eyes, face, voice, touch, and maybe even heartbeat.

 

If you choose to share your data, the uplinks and downlinks will be so fast you’ll barely think about them. That’s both the good news and the bad. If it’s too easy and too fast, you may inadvertently share something you didn’t intend to. That’s where intelligent behavioral analysis comes to play.

 

If your devices have learned your patterns, and know who your friends and trusted sources/sites are, then there will be little to no challenge. But if you do something erratic, unpredictable, or potentially dangerous, then the action will be challenged.

 

We will come to expect our devices to see, hear and understand their surroundings through technologies such as computer vision, directional audio, sensor fusion and machine learning. And from that data infer context, anticipate needs, and take appropriate actions through technologies, such as, always-on sensing and on-device machine learning.

 

Smartphone cameras won’t only capture a high-quality image and see it as millions of individual pixels, but will also understand the image, recognize objects, understand the scene, figure out context, etc. In this new paradigm, camera is not just capturing pixels, but understand them.

 

The expanded sensor array in the next generation smartphones will be extraordinary. Our phones will view the world in 3D, and collect information about things in 3D, with information about how far things are from us, and their rate of travel toward or away from us. Imagine your phone telling you, “might as well stop running, you can’t catch that bus.”

 

Augmented reality won’t be a novelty, it will be automatic and active anytime the phone senses it is not in your pocket, purse or briefcase. The AR in the phone of 2016 will constantly tell you stuff about your surroundings, and not just annoying ad-driven messages for taco stands and gas stations, but notifications about things you care about and are interested in.

 

If they get in the way you’ll simply say, “That’s enough Igor,” or, “stop it Igor,” you won’t have to tell Igor what to do in an exact construct of speech that Igor tried to train you to use, Igor will understand your intentions, and behave accordingly — a true personal companion.

Never lonely, never uncomfortable
These technologies, techniques, and concepts will spread beyond the personal companion. You’ll find them in your home, car, retail stores, and other things that you contact. Due to the massive manufacturing scale of mobile devices, processors, sensors, and associated components, parts are very inexpensive while providing amazing processing capabilities. It’s the democratization of technology and the sharing of it that will enrich our lives overall.

 

Our cars will behave smarter, more sensitive to our needs, comfort, and most of all safety. And our homes will be more aware of our presence, both coming and going, the ambient conditions inside and out, and adjust itself for our comfort while observing energy management protocols. Imagine the house getting a message from your phone alerting it to your arrival in 10 minutes.

 

The house checks the outside temperature and wind-chill factor and sets up the heaters in the rooms it knows you first use when you come home. The phone also gives the house your agenda for the day, and the house, with the phone’s help, sees that in addition to having fought with rush-hour traffic for the past 45 minutes, you were in a stressful, over-extended meeting with your boss. Aha says the house I better put on some soothing music, he probably won’t want to hear Machine Head tonight.

 

Consumer suppliers will send complex computer graphics models to your TV and/or mobile device so you can see high fidelity and faithfully reproduced examples of products you are interested in.

 

The technologies to enable these ideas are getting ready to make this a reality. All the great ideas that have been proposed over the past 20 years for the technological life of the future are remarkably close to being realized. For example, the advancements in machine learning, computer vision and other cognitive technologies.

 

It is due largely to the smartphone, its broad acceptance, and the manufacturing volume of complex electronic parts and associated software. And the processors and sensors will operate at remarkably low power while doing it. As usage and number of sensors continually increase (a dozen of sensors in your smartphone today), ultra-low power sensor processing will be essential.

 

Love triangle
Your smartphone could become a threat to your relationships. People have commented, “my phone knows me better than my husband/wife.” A Survey (by Brandon McDaniel of The Pennsylvania State University and Sarah Coyne of Brigham Young University in Utah) found that almost three quarters of women in committed relationships feel that smartphones are interfering with their love life and are reducing the amount of time they spend with their partner.

 

Jon Peddie is president of Jon Peddie Research (Tiburon, Calif), a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm.