Imagining what smartphones could look like in 50 years time
By: Ali Zaka
Tags: Future, Technology, Future Technology, Smartphones

The decade is ending were seeing many compilations from various sources rounding up smartphones from the past 10 years and tech in general. What about smartphones in the coming future and what changes would we see compared to what we have now? 50 years into the future to be precise.

By looking at the trends in years ranging from 2010 to 2020, here’s what we have found. Now of coarse we don't exactly know what the future will bring us in terms of tech in smartphones but we can at least predict. So if you are seeing this in 20 years time or so, we’re sorry.

Foldable Smartphones

Foldable smartphones were first seen on the market when Samsung first introduced the Galaxy Fold. That was a first attempt so had many compromises and flaws but in 50 years, it’s possible that we could all own a foldable phone.

In 50 years, companies could have enough time to improve on the folding mechanism and find ways to make it cheaper to implement. So in that time, we could all be walking with affordable folding tech right in our pockets.

As of right now, they’re considered gimmicky and only the more tech enthusiast person would actually buy this kind of thing. Also the software for it isn’t fully optimized to take full advantage of folding screen’s potential.

Speeds at 5G and 6G

Right now, 5G is already available in many countries but even in those countries, only in select areas is there any coverage of 5G network. The speed that 5G brings doesn’t even mean much for people living there as 4G is still a lot faster than what people need. We aren’t living in a time where 5G speeds are needed and will be fully utilized.

But this may not be the case in the future where higher quality content becomes mainstream and people require high download speeds to use their super high resolution screens at their best.

Companies have started pumping out 5G capable smartphones so maybe more and more countries will start implementing this technology and in the future 6G will be a thing and everybody will have a 5G or 6G capable device.

Who likes ports and holes in their device?

Many companies have already skipped out the 3.5mm headphone jack and in around 50 years time, it may be a distant history. More and more people use wireless headphones and soon everyone will follow the trend.

Also wireless charging is becoming mainstream in flagship smartphones like who even likes to be tethered to his phone when he’s chatting? In the future, people will toss away their wired chargers in favor of wireless options to make a truly port free smartphone.

Even more rear camera’s?

We’ve already seen the huge bumps at the rear of expensive smartphones housing some of the best cameras and up to 5 at a time! Xiaomi and Samsung already showed us their first 108 megapixel cameras in 2019 so in the future, are we gonna see even higher megapixel count?

It is estimated that the human eye has around 576MP so many companies may try to achieve that image quality in the future when super high resolution screens are readily available.

We may even see companies ditch the idea of multiple camera implementation altogether by introducing a single camera module that could do everything that is achieved by multiple cameras. For example a single camera module could take ultrawide pictures as well as zoom without the need of any other camera sensor.