SAN FRANCISCO – Since the advent of the first modern smartphone–arguably the original Apple iPhone in 2007–the power of these mobile computing devices that also happen to make phone calls has advanced by leaps and bounds.

Weak processors have given way to dual-core powerhouses. Smartphone cameras are now so capable, the best of them make owning a point-and-shoot camera redundant. And display resolutions exceed the limits of the human eye’s ability to distinguish separate pixels.

But that doesn’t mean smartphones have no room left for innovation in 2012. Here’s a look at what phone makers might pack into next year’s models.

Quad-Core Processors Arrive

Though 2011 was the year of dual-core, 2012 will bring quad-core processors to smartphones. Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processor is said to be five times faster than the dual-core Tegra 2, which debuted this year. Qualcomm, meanwhile, is planning to launch quad-core Snapdragon CPUs with speeds up to 2.5GHz, and with quad-core Adreno graphics processors for gaming.
Near-Field Communication Takes Off

Near-field communication is the technology that lets you wave a phone in front of a payment kiosk in place of a credit card. To make that happen, phone makers and wireless carriers have to put NFC capabilities in their smartphones, credit card companies need to handle the transactions, and retailers must install kiosks that accept the payments. Next year, everything may finally fall into place.

Google Wallet got a head start on the pay-by-phone front this year, but it will have lots of competition in 2012. Wireless carriers have banded together on their own NFC payment plan, called Isis, and Apple is rumored to be putting NFC in future iPhones. Research in Motion has included NFC capabilities in its BlackBerry Bold 9900. Don’t expect NFC to kill the credit card next year, but do expect plenty of retailers to accept NFC payments by year’s end.
Displays With 720-Pixel HD Resolution Become Standard

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC Rezound are among the first smartphones to boast 720p (1280-by-720-pixel) displays. Next year, 720p resolution will become the standard for high-end smartphones, and handset makers may even figure out how to fit those pixels into even smaller screens than the 4.3-inch display in the Rezound. The result should be beautiful smartphone screens whose individual pixels are impossible to tell apart.
LTE Technology Everywhere

This year was an experimental one for 4G LTE, which offers dramatic speed increases over 3G networks. Although Verizon was early with the technology, its first LTE phones–the HTC ThunderBolt and the Samsung Droid Charge–had inferior tech specs, and even newer handsets tend to drain their battery when LTE is switched on. AT&T is just getting out of the gate now, and Sprint is starting its LTE rollout in early 2012, so at some point next year 4G LTE will become standard among high-end smartphones. Let’s hope that phone makers and wireless carriers can figure out how to stop the battery drain by then.
Voice Control Moves In

Following the launch of Siri in Apple’s iPhone 4S, Google and Microsoft are no doubt scrambling to bring more voice controls to their respective smartphone platforms. As for Siri, there’s a slight chance that Apple will open up the virtual personal assistant to third-party apps in 2012; more likely, however, the company will expand Siri’s functionality in some fashion before the year is over.
Better Phones Cost Less

As cutting-edge phone tech improves, so too does the average stuff. With Apple’s iPhone 3GS sticking around for another year for free with a two-year contract, we’ll probably see some strong competition in the $0-to-$50 range–not just with Android, but with Windows Phones, as well. (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that “the cheapest phones will be Android, and we are going to have to look at bringing the cost of our handsets down.”)

The Contract-Free Battle Intensifies

Even though the fight for smartphone superiority mainly involves the major wireless carriers, a separate battle is brewing on the contract-free front. Sprint’s Virgin Mobile brand and T-Mobile’s no-contract plan through Walmart are the main combatants, offering decent Android smartphones for $35 per month and $30 per month, respectively. Expect strong follow-ups to Virgin’s Motorola Triumph and T-Mobile’s Samsung Exhibit II 4G as prepaid carriers go to war.
Augmented Reality Arrives

Augmented reality is another feature we’ve seen on a few apps here and there, but Ramon T. Lamas of IDC predicts that AR will become a standard, everyday feature in the phones of tomorrow, as opposed to being limited to one-off apps such as Google Goggles or the Layar browser.
We’ve already encountered a bit of that approach in the form of Bing’s visual search, which is built right into the Windows Phone 7 platform. If you’re traveling or just exploring your own neighborhood, for instance, you can point your phone at your surroundings, and the app will show an overlay indicating historic landmarks nearby.

No Big Battery Breakthroughs

While smartphones will continue to improve noticeably in processor power, screen quality, and data speeds, their battery life is likely to see only minor improvements. The major technological breakthroughs that could keep users from worrying about getting through the day are still in the laboratory, so the best hope for better battery life lies in optimization. Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processors, for instance, have a hidden fifth core that draws a small amount of battery life for basic tasks, and the Motorola Droid Razr can turn off battery-intensive functions automatically to conserve power. For now, however, the true 24-hour battery is still a dream.

Ovum, the analyst and consulting company, unveils the Asia-Pacific’s trends in 2011 for telecoms industry, both from fixed and mobile sectors.

For Mobile, 2011 will be dominated by increasing smartphone and wireless broadband take-up. Attractive smartphones will also proliferate more into the prepaid segment this year. But while the data traffic boom will continue unabated, operators will struggle on to seek answers on ways to monetise data.  “We are already seeing some innovative new broadband pricing strategies emerge to milk incremental ARPU from customers, but this year the monetising data dilemma will keep many senior executives awake at night”, said Nicole McCormick, Senior Analyst.

On fixed side, David Kennedy, Research Director believes that the growth of next-generation access is the trend to watch. “The continued growth of household data traffic, driven by growing demand for video services is putting pressure on older networks. We are now seeing major fibre rollouts in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Fibre is already entrenched in Hong Kong, Korea and Japan.  The Asia-Pacific region is increasingly the leading region for fibre access, and we expect to see big investments here in the coming year and beyond. More operators will imitate the leading companies to pursue service bundling, fixed value-added services, and in-home devices in an effort lock in household revenue.

For Service Providers, Ovum expects wireline revenues in AP to decline slightly in 2011, but mobile revenues will rise 6% to US$317B, supported by 10% growth in China and 15% in India. Total revenues in AP, fixed plus mobile, should grow at roughly the same 4% rate achieved in 2009 and projected for 2010. Service provider capital expenditures (capex), which eked out 1.2% growth in 2009 in AP, are on track to fall 11% in 2010 but we expect a 5% bounceback in 2011, with the Indian mobile sector a key contributor. Looking beyond 2011, we expect the ratio of capex to revenues (capital intensity) to continue falling: from 23.7% in 2008 regionally, the ratio should hit 19.7% in 2010 and 18.8% by 2015. Matt Walker, Ovum Principal Analyst, notes that this is still well above the global average of under 16%, as many markets within AP remain relatively unsaturated, retain strong economic fundamentals, and will outperform global averages for many years to come.

NEW YORK – Hardware and software enhancements could transform future smartphones into full-fledged gaming consoles or even weather stations, attendees at a processor conference said this week.

Beyond high-definition video, smartphones and tablets in the future might play 3D video and enable multiuser gaming in the cloud, attendees said at the Linley Tech Processor conference in San Jose, California.

Hardware enhancements could bring full high-definition gaming capabilities through the cloud, and later perhaps 3D for applications like video, gaming and maps, said Les Forth, field applications engineer at Freescale Semiconductor.

There will also be enhanced e-mail, chat and browsing capabilities like users experience on PCs today, Forth said. Development of such services and technology will depend on the demand for such services, and device screen sizes and battery capabilities.

Smartphones and tablets that can play full 1080p high-definition video are on tap to hit store shelves as early as this year. Toshiba and Research in Motion have announced tablets that include dual-core processors and are capable of playing 1080p video. LG has announced a smartphone that also includes a dual-core processor and 1080p video capabilities.

The upcoming devices set the start for an exciting future in video and graphics on handhelds, said Jason Byrne, a senior product marketing manager for Continuous Computing, which provides hardware, software and services to telecom and network providers.

Efforts are also underway to bring 3D screens to handheld devices. Nintendo earlier this year announced a portable gaming console with a 3D screen, which will become available next year. Synaptics earlier this year also showed a prototype smartphone with a 3D screen.

Mobile phones already carry sensors including accelerometers, and attendees believed that additional sensors for activities like facial recognition and weather monitoring could be easily added. For example, Intel’s researchers are already developing an array of sensors for smartphone-type devices to measure air quality. A mobile toolkit carries carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and ozone sensors to measure air quality, and targets the most common toxic gases people encounter.

IBM has developed a chip that can help gather data from sensors that can ultimately be sent to low-power devices such as tablets and smartphones, said Brian Bass, a senior technical staff member at IBM.

IBM has already announced the PowerEN processor, which is targeted for use in servers to mobile devices. Bass declined to comment on whether it would make it to handheld devices.

“We see [PowerEN] in the network… taking that raw data and going ahead and doing the number crunching in the middle of the network… all the way to the user-type things and sensor-type things. And you’re down at a very low-end environment where you’re just doing the data gathering and putting that intelligence there,” Bass said.

However, there are questions on whether such new capabilities would affect the size and battery life of devices.

“There’s a lot of people looking at overall power consumption of devices as well the computing power they can offer,” Freescale’s Forth said. “Remember the old phones? It pulls your shirt down. People don’t want that anymore.”

Power consumption in mobile devices depends partly on chip design, said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group. The upcoming mobile processors are not only more powerful, but also smarter in how they operate.

For example, chip makers are adding multiple cores to boost application performance while trying to minimize the impact on battery life. These chips are also able to shut down inactive cores to save power.

Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Samsung have also announced dual-core chips that are capable of handling full high-definition video. Marvell has announced triple-core chip for smartphones and tablets, which the company claims is faster than chips offered by competitors.

Manufacturing processes are also continuously improving, which helps chip makers deliver smaller and highly integrated chips with more capabilities, Gwennap said.

However, faster advances are needed in developing wireless networks to cope with data-hungry cloud and gaming applications, said Kannan Parthasarathy, an engineer at Byte Mobile.

“Now because the applications are living longer, the network is hurting,” Parthasarathy said.

SAN FRANCISCO – When I’m on the road, there are few tools in my arsenal that I value more than video chat. But as much as I love it for boosting communication with colleagues during the day and saying goodnight to my kids at bedtime, managing the current mess of disparate and disconnected chat services is a massive pain. And, as the new BlackBerry PlayBook clearly shows, it’s time for a little unity.

Research In Motion’s new tablet, the BlackBerry Playbook, supports video chat through its front-facing camera. So does the Samsung Galaxy Tab. And, according to rumor, so will the second coming of the iPad. The current array of smartphones such as the iPhone 4 and the EVO 4G also support video chat. But so far, it doesn’t appear that any of these devices will actually talk to each other–and that’s just wrong.

As someone who’s been using video conferencing in fits and starts since the mid-1990s, I’m absolutely astounded at the industry’s failure to establish and embrace a unified video conferencing system that works across multiple devices and networks. Rather than move toward a common center by adopting a common standard that lets AIM and iChat users talk to Google and Skype customers, and leaves room for any new service to jump in on the conversation, the leaders in the space have consistently put Silicon Valley power politics ahead of user experience by vying for dominance in the long-nascent category–thereby rendering almost unusable (by mainstream standards) a technology that everyone assumed would have been commonplace before the turn of the century.

Now that Apple, Google, and RIM are bringing this experience to handheld devices, the problem is going to get even worse unless these companies find a way to bridge the video divide. Apple’s FaceTime–originally launched on the iPhone, extended to the iPod Touch, and expected to be available in the next-generation iPad–could possibly emerge as that bridge.

Apple established FaceTime as an open software standard for video chat, meaning that third-parties are welcome to build on it and implement it in their own devices. Details of the video chat protocol used by the RIM PlayBook are not yet known, but screenshots of the device have icons and images that are reminiscent of FaceTime.

Apple has ambitious plans to sell 10 million FaceTime capable devices in 2010 and tens of millions more in 2011. As impressive as that seems, though, its not enough to cement FaceTime as the de facto video chat standard.

But, if devices like the PlayBook get on the FaceTime bandwagon, it could start to gain momentum and reach a level of critical mass. Its not necessarily important that FaceTime, or any single video chat protocol become dominant, but it would certainly help video chat meet user expectations if the various smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices can all find a way to play nice together.

By Adam Leach & Nathan Burley
June 10, 2010

By Lexton Snol
February 11, 2009