Emerging Mobile Technologies and Tools

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Abstract.

This research paper is geared towards analyzing the current state and showing the most likely direction that mobile technologies will take in the future. It utilizes reports from different sources such as the companies that manufacture smart devices and the opinions of credible analysts of the industry to draw conclusions of where the future of smart devices lies. As the evidence suggests, the current smart devices market is ready to embrace new technologies as the current ones become obsolete. Smartphone users yearn for bigger screens while video games enthusiasts are migrating from traditional consoles to cloud gaming services. Trends such as these are indicators of the direction that the mobile technology industry is most likely to take. This research paper suggests that, although a myriad of new devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Fold or smart homes will be released, users should not be in a hurry to buy these first generations of future devices as they are still prototypes of what the future holds.

Emerging Mobile Technologies and Tools

The mobile devices market is one of the biggest niches in the technological sector. It includes a myriad of devices such as smartphones, laptops, tablets and many more. These devices are termed as mobile because users are not required to stay in a specific location to use them. Mobile devices can be used on the go. The following section is a brief overview of some of the mobile devices in the current market and their hardware levels.

Tablets

Tablet computers are bigger than smartphones and have the same key features. However, tablets are preferred by most business owners and schooling children as they are more portable yet have the same functionality as laptops (Dunn, Gray, Moffett, & Mitchell, 2018).

Laptops

These were arguably the first powerful portable computing devices. Laptops have the power of a normal desktop computer packed into a small foldable design. Laptops used to have the advantage of having a physical keyboard as compared to tablets. However, tablet manufacturers have since developed detachable keyboards and docking stations for tablets. Laptops are still the main computing device for most business people and students who are constantly on the move and need to carry their work home (Kiaer & Mutchler, 1998).

Portable Gaming Devices

In the late 1980s, gaming consoles were innovated. For the next three decades, gaming consoles dominated the gaming market and personal computers were struggling to catch up. In the early 2000s, mainstream portable gaming consoles were developed to enable gamers to play games while they are on the go (Michaud, 2011). Such consoles include the Nintendo and the PlayStation Vita. However, these devices are gradually being overtaken by smartphones as they have a wider variety of games that are cheaper.

Smartphones

Smartphones have been termed as the Swiss army knives of mobile technology. With just one device that easily fits into pockets, users can carry out numerous tasks throughout their day. Smartphones have gone through tremendous changes over the past decade. They have evolved from pagers to personal digital assistants and finally to the smartphones we know today. Over the years, smartphones have gone through many software and physical design changes. These changes are discussed below:

Screens

First generation smartphones were bulky and had small screens with a big top, chin and bezels. The current phones now feature bezelless full screen display with only a slight notch or tear drop for the front facing cameras. The current screen to body ratio of most smartphones is well above 85%. Current smartphones also feature quality high density screens with technologies such as AMOLED which give the user an immersive clear display (Kim, Jung, & Cha, 2017). Such as screens are also touch responsive and can now be used as fingerprint sensors as well.

Storage

The storage on current smartphones has improved drastically. In order to keep up with the market’s storage demands due to an increase in applications and functionality, smartphone manufacturers also had to increase the storage space on smartphones. Currently, most mid-budget smartphones have a storage of 16 to 64 GB. Their premium counterparts have storage spaces ranging from 128 to 512 GB.

Battery Life

This area has also seen tremendous improvement. Current smartphones are energy intensive due to their heavy operating systems, high density screens and other features that they have. In order to keep up with the energy demands of the average smartphone user, manufactures have drastically improved the battery life of most smartphones. Most smartphones have battery sizes of between 3,000 to 5,000 mAh, which can last for up to 24 hours on a single charge (Arslan, et al., 2012). Smartphone manufacturers have also made charging as easy and fast as possible by incorporating features such as wireless charging, using a USB type C port and fast charging. Some phones have the ability to share power through a charging cable or their wireless charging surfaces.

Cameras

In the past, cameras were standalone devices that used film to store photographs. Current smartphones have numerous cameras. Most phones have the primary camera(s) and a secondary front-facing cameras. With the rampant popularity of social media, high quality phone cameras are now a staple for the average smartphone user. This has led to the rise of technologies such as AI cameras, panorama photography and the use of multiple lenses to take pictures.

Processing Power

According to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years. In the case of processing power, this has been the case. First generation phones had processors that were capable of handling the basic processes of running simple operating systems and phone applications such as internet browsers and communication applications. With the current operating systems sporting seamless heavy user interfaces, smartphones need faster processors and RAM to run smoothly (Chung, Shin, Park, Joshi, & Eslampour, 2015). Most phones now feature multiple processor cores and huge RAMs of up o 12GB. This has also been fueled by the rising popularity of mobile gaming which has led gaming studios to publish numerous games on platforms such as Google’s PlayStore and Apple’s iTunes.

Mobile Devices’ Technologies

When the computer was invented for public use in the late 1970s, it was a big machine that was full of vacuum tubes that filled up a whole room. This machine was capable of handling simple processes such as basic math operations. In late 1990, Steve Jobs envisioned a future where people would not be tied to stationary computing devices, rather they would have access to mobile computing devices that would easily fit into their pockets (Carton, 1997). Steve Jobs’ vision came to fruition. There are many different mobile devices in use around the world. These include smartphones, tablets, laptops, hand-held gaming devices such as the Nintendo and PlayStation Vita, GPS trackers, wireless credit card readers and many more. These mobile devices have made life easier for the average person as they no longer have to actively participate in tasks that can be partially automated. For instance, smart wear lets the user track their vital signs during exercise. With such a device, the user can comfortably lay out their exercise regime and leave the monitoring to the smart wearable device.

Just like the fitness monitoring feature, there are many technologies associated with mobile devices. These are discussed below.

Operating Systems

These are the backbones of mobile devices. They are sets of commands that run devices and enable the performance of tasks such as installing peripheral devices and sensors, and applications. There are different operating systems for different mobile devices. These include Android, iOS, Windows, Symbian, Ubuntu, Oxygen OS, Blackberry OS and many more.

Artificial Intelligence

With the increase in the complexity of operating systems and the number of tasks that users have to conduct in a day, mobile device manufacturers have incorporated AI to aid in such tasks. There are different types of AI such as those that assist in taking photos, website bots and the most popular type- smart assistants. Smart assistants are programmed to simplify the performance of certain tasks for users. For example, assistants can be used to make calls, send messages, book flights, mark dates and so on. Such assistants include Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Windows’ Cortana and Google Assistant. These assistants are usually voice activated to ensure the user does not have to have the device at hand to perform certain tasks.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Mobile devices have limited screen space. This makes it hard to carry out certain tasks such as 3D modelling, which requires bigger displays. Virtual and augmented reality technologies solve this problem by using mobile devices as display portals to a bigger and more immersive optical experience. With games such as Pokémon Go and applications such as Google Street View, augmented reality uses a smart device’s camera to ‘see’ and then overlay additional information on the captured image which is then displayed on the device’s screen. A more common use of augmented reality is photo filters on social media sites such as Snapchat and Instagram. On the other hand, virtual reality requires the use of a headset that displays different images to the eyes in order to create a sense of immersion where the user can have a full visual experience of a projected world. A popular use of virtual reality is playing video games such as Light Sabre.

Mobile Payments

With the penetration of mobile devices across the world, the use of geographically locked payment stations such as banks and ATMs has reduced when it comes to transactions such as online shopping and renewing subscriptions. Mobile devices now support mobile payment avenues such as PayPal, Venmo, Payoneer, Apple Pay and many others (Zmijewska, Ondrus, Mallat, & Dahlberg, 2008). With such payment platforms, users are able to process their payments from their mobile devices anytime anywhere, provided they have a stable internet connection.

Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is one of the biggest innovations of the past decade. Cloud storage is a service that allows users to store their data on servers instead of storing it on their physical mobile devices. With this service, users are then able to access their data using any device from any part of the world with a stable internet connection. This has also made it easier for users to avoid loss of data in cases such as losing or upgrading their smart devices. Cloud storage services are usually free up to a certain amount of storage. A popular cloud storage service is Android users’ use of their Gmail accounts to store their data.

The future of mobile technologies

It is evident that mobile devices technologies have taken great strides to get to where they are today. However, technology develops at a fast pace and there are many innovations to look forward to in the future.

2 in 1 Personal Computers

This is perhaps the most awaited development of mobile devices. The era of the current smartphone is considered to be coming to an end as there are only so much upgrades and features you can have in a device. An interesting direction that the smartphone market is expected to take is towards the use of 2-in-1 personal computers. These devices might replace the smartphone as the will have twice the screen capacity and twice the space for chips as the typical current smartphone motherboard (Tan, Kumorek, Garcia, Mooney, & Bekoe, 2015). Basically, this device will be a foldable smartphone. There have already been several entries of prototype devices into the market. Devices such as Windows Andromeda and Samsung’s Galaxy Fold have received mixed reviews due to their features. Although the devices’ screens fold and unfold seamlessly, the devices remain too bulky to fit into pockets. Industry analysts speculate that these devices have a lot of potential and that they could be the next big thing. This would probably be the case if manufacturers devise a way to make the phones less bulky so as to maintain the portability advantage that smartphones have held over tablets for so long. Another deciding factor on the success of these devices will be their prices. During its unveiling, the Samsung Galaxy Fold had a price tag of $3,000. This is triple the price of the latest top end smartphones such as the iPhone 11 and the Samsung Note 10. For these devices to experience the same level of success as the current smartphones, manufactures need to lower their prices.

Mobile Gaming

In the gaming sector, mobile gaming on smart phones has the largest market share of over 60%. This is because of the widespread penetration of smart phones as compared to traditional gaming consoles (Business Insights, 2009). Industry analysts speculate that mobile gaming will continue to grow and dominate as the biggest mode of gaming in the future. This has been propelled even further through the development of peripheral devices such as virtual reality headsets which can easily be used in conjunction with smartphones. However, the biggest contributor towards the growth of the mobile gaming market will be as a result of the move from the sale of traditional console games as physical media. This is already happening. Services such as Steam enable users to share their games and play them across multiple consoles. Sony’s initiative, PlayStation Go, takes this even further by enabling users to playing games on the company’s own servers. This means that users will no longer have to buy traditional game consoles as all they will have to do to play a game is to subscribe to the service and have a stable internet connection. This has seen the movement of major game titles such as FIFA, NFS and many more to other devices. Tech giants such as Sony, Microsoft and Google have seen the potential of mobile devices and the gradual decline of traditional gaming consoles. As these companies’ main source of revenue is from the sale of the game titles themselves, it is in their best interest to make them as accessible as possible. This will make traditional gaming consoles obsolete as the world catches on to cloud gaming. The result of this development is that mobile gaming will continue to grow and will probably be the dominant mode of gaming in the future.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

The move from smartphones to foldable devices is being fueled by users’ need for bigger screens. This is what will make virtual reality headsets an important display unit of the future. VR headsets have unlimited fields of view unlike traditional physical screens and they are suitable for tasks such as 3D modeling as the user is able to get a real 3D image of a model (Coiffer & Burdea, 2003).

On the other hand, augmented reality is also going to be a major part of the future for different reasons. Augmented reality devices will have a myriad of applications as they will be primarily used to overlay digital data over actual real-time images of physical objects. Much like Google Lens, AR will be able to scan objects and display data concerning them in real time. This will be useful in learning, location services and even advertising (Azuma, 1997). AR could also be used in reality games such as Pokémon Go.

Internet of Things

The world is slowly gravitating towards a future where almost everything will be handled on the cloud. This will mean that internet use will be at its peak. In such a world of connections, there will be an improvement in the development of the Internet of Things. The IoT is much like the normal internet, only that it is primarily a connection enabling the transfer of data between smart devices (Vinel, Wang, Yang, & Xia, 2012). With the Internet of Things, users will be able to connect all their smart devices together and manage them from a central hub such as a smartphone. Currently, this is possible between a s mall range of devices such as a smart home system, smart appliances, home assistants such as Alexa and smartphones. The result of this is that users will be able to monitor all their smart devices from anywhere and at the same time.

Purchase Recommendations

It is tempting for a user to purchase the latest devices as soon as they are unveiled. However, this will not give you value for your money as new technologies tend to be expensive. As the devices become more mainstream and more companies begin to manufacture them, a massive drop in prices follows as the market struggles to achieve equilibrium between the forces of demand and supply. Furthermore, the first few versions of new technologies tend to have short life cycles as manufacturers focus on rolling out new updates and better features so as to satisfy the market’s demand and to stay ahead of competitors. The best time to purchase devices born of new technologies is after several versions and updates have been rolled out. At this stage, the market is more likely to be stable thus devices will become cheaper and have a longer life cycle.

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