The March of The Mobile

Predicting the future is difficult and there are enough examples that show that even industry experts are prone to getting it completely wrong. In 1943 IBM Chairman Thomas Watson said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," and as recently as 1977  Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp said "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." Both predictions were spectacularly wrong. And in 2006 David Pogue, writing in The New York Times, said, "Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, 'Probably never.'" By March 2014, iPhone sales had reached 500 million devices.

The iPhone; Who saw that coming?

The march of the mobile phone has been inexorable. In 1993 Vodafone predicted that just 10% of the UK's population would own a mobile by the year 2000, yet now  there are over 90 million mobile phone subscriptions in a population of 64.6 million people. Mobile phones are so ubiquitous that you probably don't know anyone who doesn't own one; 93% of the adult population have one and 66% own smartphones. Mobile phones, some people said, would never supplant the landline, yet now the landline phone sits forlorn and largely ignored, except by the elderly. I only keep our landline because that is how we get our broadband and on the rare occasions the phone rings it is either my Mother-in-Law or a marketing call, and thanks to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), the latter have reduced to a trickle (except the other night when I got two, at 1am and 4.30am).

UK mobile and landline usage. Source: Ofcom

As we know, the mobile phone, particularly the smartphone, is more than just a device for making phone calls and sending text messages, nowadays the crucial part of your mobile phone contract will be how big your data allowance is and how much you pay for it. A typical 500MB monthly allowance would let you view 5,000 basic web pages or watch an hour of video, but as streaming high definition videos or watching TV on your mobile becomes ever more popular, "all you can eat" data allowances are essential, to which the mobile phone companies are responding by hiking prices. Three has stopped offering customers an "all you can eat" plan at £17 per month, increasing their tariff to £30 in response to the huge additional demand.

But as well as checking Facebook or Twitter while we are on the move, we are increasingly using mobiles to buy stuff online, to check our bank accounts and pay for things. You can pay for your parking using your mobile, or with Apple Pay, just about anything by adding your bank card to your phone and using it in the same way as a contactless payment card. At the end of this month Android Pay will go live in the UK using similar technology. The future is likely to see our smartphones enabled for us to complete more and more of our daily tasks. The Hive Active Heating app allows British Gas customers to control their central heating at home from their phone. Smartphones can be used to set your TV recorder and Vodafone have an app enabling you to control your home broadband connection remotely. Inevitably more will follow.

SEAT and Nissan are just two car manufacturers who are integrating mobile phone technology into their vehicles, enabling your car to read you text messages from your phone for instance, or control the air conditioning and heating. Meanwhile Volvo have announced that from 2017 they plan to become the world’s first car manufacturer to offer cars without keys. Volvo customers will be offered an app for their mobile phones to replace the physical key with a digital one. Which is all very well, except that I cannot get the app on my phone to work with my Nissan, and people who can have found that the app can be hacked and that they can send messages to cars other than their own, although there is no suggestion that this could work while cars were in motion nor affect steering and impact safety.

Volvo drivers will soon be able to unlock their cars with their phone.

In the future we could be offered the option to do away with our front door key and unlock it with our mobile. Replacing season tickets for rail travel or entry to sports grounds with mobile phone apps may become commonplace (you can already use a smartphone in place of an Oyster Card on the tube in London), employers may replace workplace ID cards with mobile phone apps and while at present we still need to insert our bank card in an ATM to withdraw money, will the day come when we simply point our phone at the screen instead? We can already order a takeaway pizza from our phone, so why not be able to order from a restaurant menu at the same time as we book a table using our phone? Arrive at the restaurant, take a seat and hey presto, your meal arrives immediately that you wave your phone at a reader on the table.

Watching video content, streaming music, reading books and magazines on your smartphone are all so commonplace, old hat even, that it is hard to imagine what you cannot theoretically do with your phone. And as more and more of our lives are lived through our phones, replacing bank cards, remote controls and even car keys, we are becoming ever more reliant on them, which is where it is probably prudent to inject a note of caution...for two reasons. The first is the battery life. Apparently the average between charge and depletion is one or two days, but we all know that with even moderate use your phone can dip to zero inside a single day, which is why battery packs are becoming not only more popular but nigh on must haves. Imagine the frustration of the Volvo owner of the not too distant future who gets to his car and finds his phone battery dead and incapable of unlocking his car? Or the similar angst of the shopper whose phone dies at the checkout, leaving them unable to pay for their purchases? There are plenty of tips out there about extending the life of your battery; personally I find turning off mobile data other than when I actually need it to be the best, but even so I still find the battery running down alarmingly at times. Secondly there is the idea of "putting all your eggs in one basket." Lose your credit card and you probably still have some cash, your rail ticket, your car keys. If their replacements are all embedded in your phone and it is lost, stolen, breaks or simply runs out of juice and you are up the proverbial creek, paddleless. Aside from which we can never forget the potential vulnerabilities of Near Field Communication (NFC) that many of these payment methods and systems of communication rely upon that could be exploited by cyber criminals.

The battery pack, fast becoming an essential piece of kit.

Don't get the impression that I am some sort of Luddite; I am as happy to embrace new technology, including smartphones, as the next man. The growing interest in the use of  the material graphene in mobile phone batteries, a material that would potentially reduce the amount of time needed to charge a battery, extend life to over a week and radically change the way smartphones look, might mean that the days of worrying how much charge you have left could be a thing of the past within the next few years. But even so it will be a long time before I ditch my car keys and credit cards, although by the very nature of such predictions, I could well be wrong.