I asked this question on linkedin and got couple of interesting and reflective answers on touch, voice, holograms and even brain controlled phones in the future. As this blog is called screensumer, I did some search on the web to figure about the smallest but the most integral piece of screen in our lives.
There’s an excelled piece by Priya Ganapati on Wired’s gadget lab blog where she talks about touchscreens from apple, voice from vlingo, speedier keyboards by swype and point and find from nokia. Here’s a fantastic quote which suggests the right approach
"So much of how we understand technology is visually driven," says Rachel Hinman, a strategist with Adaptive Path, a user-experience and design-consulting firm. "Mobile interface design has to mimic the touch, sight, gesture and auditory feeds that we use to interact with our environment."
My thinking on the Mobile Interfaces of today and tomorrow
Buttons:
The button as the interface will stay and they can’t go obsolete at least for a decade or so. While the touch interfaces are cool, there will be many people who due to various cognitive reasons will still prefer buttons. There’s also a economic & social reasoning to this in places where mobiles has not reached 100% penetration. We will continue to see all buttons and hybrid (buttons+touch) for sometime.
Touchscreens: Touch, Multi-touch, Touchless
Touchscreens allow you to do more on your mobile, has just evolved recently and the possibilities are endless. This is the standard interface for the mobile of the future. Touch will never go, in fact it has many surprises stored for us.
No rubbing and talking 
. Just imagine about Microsoft SideSight to be available on your phone soon, it’s not touch, it’s multi-touch. Elliptic Labs rightly calls their interface technology as the touchless (video).
Speech/Voice
How cool it would be to just talk to your phone and get everything done. But speech is a beast which is very difficult to tackle. The properties of speech get affected by weather, environment, user’s health, emotions and endless other permutation and combinations. That’s the reason why speech recognition even of the best of current handset doesn’t work
The other problem with speech is the mobile itself, to learn your modulation it has to learn so much that it requires 1000x the horse power it has currently got now.
I could only get some information about Vlingo, others services seem to be app or gateways for voice based services and not the things that can control your device itself.
Thought / Neural input devices
Soon you would be able to think a phone number and your phone will start dialing [computerworld]. Cool, ain’t it but don’t tell me to wear that thought control hat. Companies like Emotiv, EmSense and Neurosky are working hard on it and this doesn’t look like wishful thinking to me.
Other Advancement in Mobile Interfaces
Imagine the possibilities of having these interfaces on your mobile.
Some of the real dependencies affecting the future of mobile interface.
(Socio-economic reasons excluded)
- The microprocessor & integrated circuits- Not just how much CPU cycles it can burn but also how it can keep it cool. A burn there in your trouser’s pocket will be really harmful. Again just advancement of microprocessor and compacting is not enough, the bus, the coppers and other specialized microprocessor has to match the speed as well.
- Storage - We have already seen some good storage capacities on the phone, but here we are talking about the RAMs and the ROMs and the cost of having the on-board memories for your mobile’s personal usage and not for storing the mp3s.
- Sensors – To sense the touch, to sense the touchless, to sense the voice, to sense the thoughts. It’s tied to your phone or is it a plug-n-play add on. How small it is, or how small it can become. The cost of having it on-board or having it as an attached.
- Software – If the future is mobile will it follow what has happened on OS & application front. Like PC architecture is there an open architecture on Mobile. Has the developer ecosystem already arrived on mobile. Will you buy your mobile from someone, the OS from other and applications from some other and the peripheral add-on from some some other. Would you be able to assemble the mobile phones of future or simply walk into showroom buy one and not to worry about whatever I said above.
