The smartphone has completely changed the way that the workplace functions, providing near-constant access to all the wonders of the Internet. People can communicate in ways previously never thought possible, and the possibilities these days are indeed limitless. There are applications out there that can make life more fulfilling and business more productive.

Innovation has played a large part in determining what can be done in the smartphone market, but innovation growth has slowed, leading the market to plateau in a sense. With so much invested in electronics manufacturers, investors are growing more wary of their investments. Today, we’re going to look at what smartphones can do to continue to evolve and become the tools of the future.

Smartphone Popularity
It should come as no surprise that people are hooked on their phones. With more people using phones than ever before–over 3 billion, there is constant access to applications and social media. They also use their phones for games, dictation, pictures, videos, and much more; and, that’s not even including the business side of things.

Unfortunately, even with how dynamic these devices are, some smartphone manufacturers have found themselves in a capital deficit. This is the case even when considering how popular the Internet has become all around the world.

The Future of Smartphones
We think that the easiest way to think about the future of smartphones and their place in the world of the future is to be imaginative with bold predictions, even if they seem unlikely. Smartphones up until recently have all looked quite similar. Early smartphones had full keyboards rather than the responsive touch screens of today. This leads us to imagine the first innovation: in-display fingerprint readers.

Security is important and on the rise, and Huawei and Xiaomi have begun incorporating this technology into their flagship devices. Rather than building these features into the device’s contents, engineers can stop worrying about whether a fingerprint display will be accessible, as it’s built right into the screen.

Additionally, there is a great amount of capital being invested into improving the quality of smartphone screens. They are being developed with more powerful and flexible materials, and smartphone manufacturers are hoping to use these displays to further strengthen their devices. In the near future, it’s possible we’ll see OLED flexible screen technology. Plus, the amount of pixels displayed on these devices will be able to push phones more toward the use of media. It’s expected that phones will reach 8K quality video over the next few years.

In regard to content capture, one of the biggest shifts in today’s mobile phones is that of improved media capture through cameras and microphones. The future of how phones will be used might see the introduction of cameras that have multiple different lenses to provide new features to users. Concept photos of new flagship devices have been released, leading to the opportunity for countless new options in the future. In the meantime, a word of caution; the higher the resolution and quality of a media file, the larger the file is, meaning that you’ll need an exceptionally quick network to transfer media in a reliable way.

Remember 5G? It’s been thought that we will see it soon, as 4G has been around for nearly a decade at this point. While it might still take a few years, the bandwidth promised will be coming soon. The average speed of today’s 4G mobile network is around 30-to-100 Mbps, but 5G could have us looking at speeds of up to 10 or even 20 times that. This could drive innovation and create more opportunities for businesses that rely on mobile applications.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what cool new features are added to mobile devices, because if they aren’t powerful enough to handle them, the device simply won’t see any use. With this advance in power, better batteries are being developed. Today’s phones use a lithium ion or lithium polymer battery, but the phones of the future may be powered by solid-state batteries using solid electrodes and electrolytes rather than the liquid and polymer electrolytes of today’s smartphone batteries.

Which smartphone features are you looking forward to most in the coming years? Let us know in the comments.