My Ideas

I've been thinking a lot about cell phone technology recently, I'm not sure why, but here're some of my ideas.  

Everything you ever carry in your pockets/wallet will be added to your cell phone.  Japan and Korea are already experimenting with using your phone to replace your credit card, mainly on public transportation right now.  Your ID will be encoded to your cell phone so all you have to do is swipe it in front of an ID reader and it'll spit out your info.  My first two ideas for this application would be police and hospitals.  Certain info would be encoded with certain tags, so a hospital ID reader would only pull out info relevant to hospital needs, etc.  

Car keys?  No thanks, just use your cell phone.  Jeff Wass has a "key" that he keeps in his pocket, and when he gets close to his car it unlocks it.  This will be added to your cell phone.  Same thing with your house, no more reaching for keys when your arms are full of groceries.  You'll also be able to encode it to any door you have access to, like at work.

Phones are already accessing the internet, and playing music and videos, but the screens are small.  This past year, bendable displays hit the public sector and over the next few years will become ubiquitous.  Add a bendable and foldable display to your phone and suddenly your hand-held device has a 10" screen on it. 

For those of you who don't know what Electronic Ink is, it's a screen that isn't backlight like your normal monitor.  Backlit screens are bad for your eyes.  Instead, e-ink is used for reading, primarily, or displaying a single image for extended periods of time.  The technology doesn't need to maintain the display or image, it just flips the pixels from white to black and they'll stay.  Therefore, it consumes very little battery (look up e-ink if my description isn't good, or isn't enough for you).  

Touchscreen devices are all the rage now.  Electronic ink is becoming more and more popular, thanks largely to amazon.com's Kindle.  They have yet to figure out how to make one screen do both, but they will soon enough.  The screen will be bendable/foldable, multitouch, and e-ink capable.  You will also be able to write/draw on the screen, just like some computers and PDAs today.  A simple swipe of your phone will scan a document into it and allow you to edit it as you wish (very convenient for school teachers, hint hint).  You'll also store all your books in it and read it with e-ink, with highlighting and note-taking capabilities.  Need to exchange phone numbers?  No more bothering with typing in the wrong number, just place the phones on top of each other for a second or two and the data will be transferred.  Want information on an item with a barcode on it?  Scan the barcode and it's info will be found online and put on your screen.

These are a couple of kinda silly applications for phones, but they might happen, who knows?  Some cars have presets in case of different drivers.  For instance, the man is taller and bigger, he wants his seat in a different position so there's a button to push to get it back to that perfect position.  When the woman drives it, she has her button, too.  What if phones did this automatically?  Everytime you did something, drive a car, take a shower, enter a barber shop, use a toaster, etc, it would load your previous preference.  Phones may be linked to your closet so that only clothes that are appropriate for the weather will be displayed.   They could be linked to your house and know when you're approaching in order to turn on the a/c or heat and get it comfortable before you enter.  Using GPS, your phone could show you coffee shops close to you, you could choose one and its menu would pop up.  Choose your cup of mud and the phone will trasmit your order and payment to the shop, along with your ETA.  If you change your mind, you'll have until the store begins making your cup (which will be based upon your ETA) to cancel order and payment.  This  sounds like calling in an order, but it will be done through one giant, aggregate web-based mapping program (hint hing, Google) and you don't have to do anything other than touch the screen a couple of times.

With all these functions, the devices battery life will be about 20 seconds, right?  Wrong.  Batteries are always getting smaller, lasting longer, and charging quicker.  But, put these technologies together and see what you can come up with: wireless battery charger, charging batteries in seconds.  What if there were battery-charging towers placed throughout a city that transmitted wireless power to all your devices?  You could set them up to charge only when they hit a certain battery level, so they wouldn't all be charging all the time, taxing the system.  And, it would charge very quickly, perhaps in minutes.  (This could also apply to electronic cars, read this if that idea is interesting to you: <http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/a-wireless-battery-charging-technology-or-much-more-20061116/>).  

So what about security?  What happens if you lose your cell phone?  You'd basically lose your life, but Apple is supposedly expirementing with adding an eye scanner to iPhones to increase security.  I think a good combination of ocular scanner, finger scanner, and voice recognition would get the job done, as these become more common, smaller, and cheaper.

Everything in this article, besides using your phone to replace your credit card, and the security, are my own ideas.  Sure, I've mentioned some existing technologies, but I've applied them in ways I haven't seen anyone else do.  Some of these ideas are far-fetched, but in 100 years or sooner, people will look back and ponder how we ever lived with our ancient, caveman devices we call cell phones.  Some of my ideas aren't going nearly far enough, I'm sure, but time will tell.  I think about things like this a lot, and I always complain when an idea I had 3 years ago finally hits market, but few believe I had that idea.  Well, now I have some sort of documented proof for the next 10-20 years of complaining.