The Phones They Are a-Changin’

From the dawn of time, or at least the early-1980s, mobile phones have been evolving. The first commercially available mobile phones hardly warranted the name mobile, they were tantamount to small briefcases, just as heavy, and sometimes heavier. It wasn’t too long before they had shrunk down to what Alan Partridge described as, “big black plastic bricks with a rubber bread stick sticking out of the top”. Year-on-year technology advanced and so phones grew smaller and smaller until, by the late-1980s, they could finally fit in your pocket with the release of phones such as the Motorola MicroTAC 9800X; as long as said pocket was fairly large. This ever shrinking trend of the mobile phone did not end here, the ceaseless quest for tinier and tinier phones marched on. A landmark in the battle against bulky phones came in 1994 when Motorola released the first ever ‘clam shell’ mobile phone, the Motorola StarTAC. This clam shell design essentially allowed the phone to be folded in half making it genuinely pocket sized.

From here on in, until very recently, the race continued to make the smallest phone with the most technology crammed inside. By the mid-2000’s this had started to change with the software and hardware features of mobile phones, such as applications (apps), music playback and cameras, beginning to gain precedence over the size of the phone. This change was embodied by a new ground-breaking smartphone from Apple called the iPhone. Previously smartphones had been business driven email machines that were usually quite large. The first genuinely successful smartphone was released by Nokia in 1996, called the Nokia 9000 Communicator it featured all the basics of the smartphone; a phone (obviously), SMS, space for 200 contacts, internal memory (albeit only 8MB), email and fax. Although all these advanced features packed into one phone meant that, looks wise, it had more in common with a house brick than an iPhone. The iPhone undoubtedly set a precedent for a new breed of smartphones. Phones that had all the features required of a business phone but also extra, premium features such as WiFi, music and video storage and playback, and games normally confined to purpose built games devices, yet were still of a decent size.

The entry of this new strain of smartphone marks the point on our timeline where the great size disparity between the top phones ends. The main reason behind this is that modern smartphones need a screen big enough to comfortably interact with, be it watching a film, playing games, or surfing the net whilst still being small enough to carry around. There is a relatively narrow size range covering the majority of the current smartphone market, roughly between 110-125mm x 58-69mm for height x width. Any size fluctuation is either because of the addition of a QWERTY keyboard and/or a slightly larger screen. Given this size standard that most people seem to be satisfied with, where is the next step for smartphone design? Has it hit a glass ceiling in terms of physical form, or is it simply a case of mixing advanced technology with innovative designs?

There are a few glimpses as to what we might expect from next generation, or perhaps generation after, smartphones in the shape of concept and even prototype designs. Four of the more intriguing ones are the Nokia Morph, Mozilla Seabird, Flip Phone and the PaperPhone. The biggest step forward for the design of mobile phones in the last few years is the development of e-ink technology. It can display text and images, hold said text and images without using electricity, reflect light like normal paper and be manipulated into different shapes whilst functioning normally. Examples of e-ink technology are already on the market in such devices as the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Sony Reader. The technology has now progressed even further with the revealing of an e-paper based prototype phone called the PaperPhone. This prototype is millimetres thick, can do the phone essentials such as make calls, send texts and emails, but also play music and display e-books. It is designed so that bending the display is a form of input, for instance bend it one way and it scrolls through your contacts, bend it another and it calls the selected contact. Even though the PaperPhone is still only a prototype its creator, Dr Roel Vertegaal, believes it is only the start claiming, “Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years.” Despite this exciting prototype the use of e-ink displays for mobile phones is still in its infancy; developers are currently working on enabling a colour display and ironing out certain weaknesses such as image ghosting and a low refresh rate.

Not quite at the prototype stage like the PaperPhone, the Nokia Morph is a concept device created by the Nokia Research Centre (NRC) in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre. The NRC are constantly looking towards the future of mobile technology and according to Nokia’s chief technology officer, Bob Lannucci, they are “looking at ways to reinvent the form and function of mobile devices” and believe The Morph concept phone “shows what might be possible”. There are a number of potential future features that the Nokia Morph introduces; some are conceptually familiar, such as solar charging and smaller, longer lasting, faster to charge batteries. Whereas others, such as transparent phones and nanotechnology, are slightly more obscure. Another example of one of these stranger ideas is that of phones made from superhydrophobic materials, which basically means they are highly water and dirt repellent and essentially self-cleaning.

The other two concept phones are the Flip Phone and Mozilla Seabird. The Flip Phone designed by Kristian Ulrich Larsen is a three-screen display smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard that can fold and move into different shapes. It has three flexible Super AMOLED screens connected via steel mesh links meaning it can be transformed to suit different tasks, for example expanding content over multiple screens when on the internet or to read ebooks. The Mozilla Seabird also aims to break the boundaries of mobile phone screen size suggesting projection technology could be a large part of the smartphone’s future. With miniature projectors embedded within the phone a full size working keyboard would be projected outwards onto the work surface around it with an infrared touch pad below and a large screen projected onto the wall. Crucially this would all but bring the desktop/laptop experience to the mobile phone and perhaps spelling the end for netbooks or even tablets.

It is unlikely that all of these phones, or even all their features and ideas, will become a reality. But it is certain that at least some of them will find their way into the handsets of the future whilst others will no doubt inspire different advances. What the future holds we just don’t know, but it is getting nearer and it’s exciting.