What will the phone of tomorrow look like?

CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is the biggest tech trade show on earth.

Every year in Las Vegas, companies come to showcase their newest inventions and revolutionary electronic products as a means to demonstrate their R&D capabilities and grab media attention with tech that no one has seen yet.

This year's CES was also filled to the brim with tech that will most likely influence our daily lives in the near future, especially our daily driver smartphones that genuinely need a metamorphosis after having looked almost the same for more than a decade.

When we think of a futuristic phone, we are most likely imagining a squared-off slab-like gadget that has elements hovering above the translucent screen like a hologram, thanks to the Tony Stark-like innovators we see in Sci-Fi movies and shows.

And that might actually be possible as the tech to build such a phone already exists.

Holographic displays

Enter holographic displays, which were all the hype at CES this year. Many brands tried their luck with this seemingly futuristic technology, two of which made headlines (and for good reason).

Holoconnects, the holographic technology company based in the Netherlands, introduced Holobox, a 2-metre-high telephone-booth-like 3D holographic display at CES this year. This giant display can have multiple functions in telecommunication, advertisement, and marketing.

This 3D holographic display allows people to talk over the internet as one would on Zoom, Meet or FaceTime, but with one special perk: It adds depth information to the displayed visuals, making it seem life-like, as if the person on the other end you are talking to is present in front of you.

Looking Glass Go is another holographic gadget that stunned the attendees at the annual trade show in January. It is a portable holographic display that can convert two-dimensional images into three-dimensional holograms using generative AI.

Using AI, US-based hologram company Looking Glass's proprietary computational technology assumes the spatial data for any 2D image and then generates the information to fill in the gaps between 2D and 3D, making the ordinary picture look holographic. And more surprisingly, the holograms are displayed on just a mere six-inch screen.

It might just be a matter of time for holographic technology to leap off of the six-inch screen of Looking Glass Go to the six-inch screens of our phones.

AI in smartphones

Artificial intelligence is clearly going to take the steering wheel in the coming years and our phones are going to be on the forefront of this advancement.

Smartphone assistants, despite being smart, are hardly capable of doing complex tasks. It can understand if you want it to book a flight or place an order for food, but it cannot actually do that for you. It can show you the prices and give you the links to go and do it yourself. But they are not smart or capable enough to place the actual order. However, these limitations can be overcome with the help of AI, such as rabbit r1.

AI startup rabbit inc is dedicated to the development of a personalised OS through a natural language interface along with building the hardware infrastructure to host that operating system. The result is a personal pocket AI companion, rabbit r1, one of the many gadgets from CES this year dedicated entirely to AI implementation in our day-to-day lives.

The rabbit r1 uses a new type of foundation model for AI, the Large Action Model or LAM, which allows the machine to understand human intentions and then execute them on-device with minimum user supervision.

Dual OS

Operating system limitations will likely fade as compatibility across devices improves. In the future, we might not even have several OS for gadgets.

Everything could be open source under one singular operating system or at least, there would be some sort of inter-OS compatibility, eliminating the gaps between connectivity across devices.

At CES 2024, Lenovo showcased their new tablet-laptop hybrid that can run two OS simultaneously. The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid, a 2-in-1 laptop, runs on both Android and Windows operating systems.

When docked with the keyboard, it works as a regular Microsoft Windows PC; undocked, it can perform tablet-like tasks with Android while still having access to the files and apps from the Windows PC.

Health diagnosis

Besides being open source or having cross-OS capabilities, new sensors, and add-ons are expected to come to our mobile devices, especially the ones that are related to the user's physical and mental wellbeing.

Companies like Apple have already added several key health indicators, including heart rate, and blood oxygen level, and developed tests like ECG for their devices.

Other companies are also following in their footsteps and as a result of the industry-wide R&D, these technologies are getting better very fast.

Medical tests that were seemingly impossible to do without bulky med tech, like medical-grade ECG are now possible in compact devices like the Withings BeamO, presented at CES this year.

Despite its compact size, this at-home health checkup device can do four things — measure temperature, act as a digital stethoscope, take medical-grade ECG readings, and provide accurate blood oxygen levels in just a minute. Such medical tech accomplishment in such a small device fuels the future where our phones will be our closest diagnostic centres.

E ink

There is also hope for cosmetic enhancements to our next-gen phones. Back in CES 2022, car manufacturer BMW presented their iX Flow featuring E Ink. With this E Ink technology, users can change the colour of their car in seconds from the dashboard.

If this E Ink technology makes its way into the smartphone industry, we could have phones that can change their colour dynamically upon command. No need to settle between the matt black and shiny blue versions of your favourite phone. You will be able to get all the colours or even customise the look as you want it.