Remember back in the original Star Trek series how Spock carried around a tricorder? I always wanted one of those. Now, of course, I have something even better: my iPhone. Smartphones are general purpose devices that perform many functions, certainly more than the original tricorder. Today’s smartphones are actually more like the “terminals” from Iain M Banks’ Culture series.
I was reminded of all this by the recent XKCD Cell Phone Functions cartoon. The cartoon is a timeline of present and future functions subsumed by our phones. The most recent function to be assimilated is “car key.” Those functions not yet performed by the smartphones are all jokes: things like dog leash and band-aid.
That got me wondering what else we could have our phones do. They already provide an interface to the world’s knowledge—including things like the current state of the stock market and the weather—so any additions to that category aren’t really new. Smartphones are, of course, really computers first and communication devices second so again any additions to general computing or communication capabilities don’t count (although I can’t think of any communication function they don’t already perform).
The only obvious thing I can think of is suggested by the band-aid joke: health monitoring. Smartphones are already doing some of that and I’m sure we’ll see more such functionality in the near term. We could, I suppose, add some trivial sensors like a thermometer but I can’t think of any major functionality they don’t already have. What about you? Can you think of some plausible function smartphones could perform that they aren’t already doing?