The Mobile Phone in 2010

Posted September 30th, 2008 by Kathryn in Mobile Industry News

2010 sounds like such a futuristic year but the truth of the matter is that this date is right around the corner. Are the handsets of this future era going to be really different from what they are today? Will the mobile phone industry have changed a lot in just the scant year-and-a-half it takes to reach this milestone year? Or will the wireless phones we see in 2010 be strikingly similar to the ones that are emerging on to the market today? While some people predict that phones will be projecting 3D holograms by 2010, others say that the industry is going to just look like a slightly more grown-up version of what it looks like right now. Regardless of which side of the debate they are on, a lot of people are out there talking about the 2010 cell phone market.

Here is a look at some of the things that people are predicting for 2010 in terms of wireless phones and the industry surrounding them:

3D Holograms on Handsets

One of the more fun predictions that people in the industry are making is that 2010 is going to be the year that three-dimensional holograms are going to come to handsets. That’s because a tech company in India called Infosys has patented technology that makes it possible for 3D films, goods and images to be projected in high resolution through mobile devices. One prediction says that there will be eight million units in the global 3D screen market by 2010.

Open Source Handsets

We are starting to see a widespread interest in the development of open source wireless phone handsets with the upcoming release of Google’s Android. Open source handsets will allows users to access the applications and features that they want for their phones without being tied down to just those things that are offered by the wireless carrier. People are increasingly interested in personalizing their mobile phones and open source handsets really take that to the next level.

The reason that 2010 is going to be a big year for open source handsets is because that is the year when the Symbian Foundation’s first open source handsets are due to be released. Nokia has recently purchased Symbian and will be setting up the Symbian Foundation to create an open source platform intended to compete against the Android platform. This will mean increased competition in the open source handset arena and therefore a lot of attention will be on this area of mobile phone growth in 2010.

Big Push By LG

2010 is the goal year that Korean handset maker LG has set for itself to gain an edge over the competition and to land in the “Top 3†of all global handset makers. Right now Motorola is in that number three spot but LG believes it will only take a couple of years to move ahead of Motorola. LG has seen significant growth due to recent high sales of touchscreen phones, something that should get an added boost with the upcoming release of the LG Renoir, the company’s first 8-megapixel touchscreen camera phone.

Touchscreens To Be The Norm

LG isn’t the only company that has done well for itself with the release of advanced touchscreen phones. The iPhone is another obvious example of a touchscreen-based phone and there are numerous additional examples on the shelves and heading towards the market today. According to one recent survey, more than one third of wireless phone users today believe that the demand for touchscreens is going to continue to the point where they are the norm among phones by 2010.

GPS As a Standard Feature

The same survey said that over eighty percent of respondents believed that GPS would be integral to the development of mobile phones by 2010. This is in line with predictions that the price of GPS-enabled phones is going to drop considerably so that basically all phones except for the lowest-end models are going to come equipped with GPS. What is pointed out by that survey, though, is that just the integration of GPS into phones won’t be sufficient for the average user. What people really want is full integration of all location-based services so that they can access location information at any time (which isn’t always possible with the faulty abilities of GPS on mobile phones today).

What is likely to happen is that phones will integrate a range of different location-based services that are based on GPS. We are also likely to see a serious surge in the number of GPS applications that are available to users particularly if it is true that we are going to be seeing a lot of those open source handsets that let us choose the applications that we really want. The recent winners of the Android Developers Challenge almost all offered location-based services so we can see that this is something driving the forward-thinking mobile phone market today.

Mobile TV Will Finally Really Take Off

There has been an ebb and flow in the development of mobile TV services for the wireless phone. There was a surge in the service for awhile (and it remains a highly popular feature of mobile phones in Japan) but very few companies have found a way to make mobile TV viable and yet cost-effective for viewers. Advances in technology have finally taken place that are allowing mobile TV to really start to get going again. A recent reduction in the cost of mobile digital TV chips has made it more likely that companies can afford to invest in this service. And some people are predicting that 2010 is the year when we are really going to start to see widespread mobile TV viewing on cell phones.

Additional Changes By 2010

Many of the other changes that we can expect from out mobile phones by 2010 are not so much changes as they are improvements and increased adoption of services that people are interested in using today. For example, mobile social networking has really taken off in the past year and is likely to continue to grow. There is also some belief that mobile VoIP is going to peak around 2010. It is possible that mobile video messaging and mobile instant messaging will both become more prevalent features of every day life for modern mobile phone users over the course of the next two years. And finally there is a big demand for high-speed full-browser Internet surfing to become standard on mobile phones .