12 Billion Mobiles In Next 10 Years!
Another half-billion mobile users are machines. Electric meters, escalators, automobiles, security cameras, with built-in cellular modules. They auto-report readings, usage status, failures. Some, like digital doorlocks, allow remote control.
Both parts are seeing explosive growth. Users are adding mobile data devices, including tablets, laptops, connected GPS units. And by 2020, many household and office appliances, and most vehicles, will have cellular modules, for usage, status, and maintenance reporting.
All this will add at least another six billion mobile-phone subscriptions by 2020. And so we'll have 12 billion cellular devices fighting for scarce spectrum.
So here's where the mobile phone is headed in the next ten years:
Ubiquity: They'll be all around, inside appliances, cars, bicycles. These embedded modules will make up a third of 12 billion "subscriptions" by 2020.
Data-only devices will rival phones in numbers, by 2020: dongles, iPads, SIMs in laptops.
Smartphones will be 100 percent of the mobile-phone population, up from about a quarter now. Even the cheapest $30 model will be a smartphone.
The battery will struggle to keep pace with apps and displays, even with advances such as nanowire lithium-polymer. Till 2020, when we should see the next big leap in battery tech. This could be lithium-air, magnesium, fuel-cell, or something else.
Wearable wrist-watch phones will start getting into vogue by 2015, from Apple, Samsung and others, but will get really practical only by 2020, with major changes in battery tech.
Beyond 4G, the big challenge is to squeeze 12 billion devices into the same scarce spectrum. This will be met through a 5G tech that will focus less on giant leaps in raw speed, and more on efficiently using less spectrum for heavy mixed-media use.
So what will the phone look like in 2020?
Current shapes - slim, all-touch units - will continue at the low end. They'll all be smartphones, of course. At the upper end, there'll be serious, wearable phones, in wristwatches, even spectacle-frames. Spanning both ends will be heavy use of video. While, all around us, invisibly, those billions of embedded cellular modules will keep chattering.
