BT futurologist Ian Pearson predicts a dramatically different world where we will all be connected to each other and communicating wirelessly by 2020.
Mobile phones are now owned by more than half the world’s population - not bad when you remember five years ago, less than half still hadn’t made their first phone call. So where will it all go next?
Already, memory sticks are selling quickly at 4GB capacity. But by 2020, memory sticks - or their future equivalent - will probably be big enough to hold your whole music, photo and video collection and any other personal data. Of course, all that can easily be incorporated into portable devices.
However, it won't be possible to hold everyone's data on just one such device, and especially not real-time data, so the portable device must still provide ultra-high speed access to networks to allow people to access other stuff. It will also know precisely where you are, who you are and what you are doing, now and next week.
So the 2020 portable device will have huge data storage and computation capability, will help you navigate, manage your diary, and access networks at high speeds. But there will be a more fundamental change.
Top end displays by then will be heads-up, fully 3D and totally immersive. Think active contact lenses, overlaying computer generated imagery on everything you look at. Cheaper models will be glasses-based. Active contact lenses will use lasers to create images directly on your retina, with as much resolution as your eyes can cope with.
The images will change as you move your eyes, creating a totally immersive virtual world. With accurate positioning and some image recognition, augmented reality will become the normal view of the world. Location based information and services will be abundant, and some will appear in your view as you look around. Building appearance will depend on the taste of the person looking at it. So will the appearance of other people.
People, building and objects will emit a digital aura that contains alternative digital appearances as well as marketing information. Of course, people will emit all kinds of data about themselves. You will walk around in a digital bubble, opening up a secure electronic gateway to the rest of the world.
The digital bubble has many uses. As well as gathering real-time data on what is nearby that might be of interest, it is also interacting with other people's bubbles, introducing you to people who would like to meet you. So your business life will be easier because you will attract new business contacts. And your social life will improve too.
The digital bubble is just one tiny component of the infrastructure supporting this virtual environment overlaying the physical world with endless layers of the digital world. Chips will be everywhere: sensors, processors, communicators, storage. The portable device will connect to all of these to gather lots of information, process it, and present it to the user.
Augmented reality is another business and social platform of similar significance to the internet. It takes everything that the net can do to the next stage, overlaying it all on the real world. The virtual environment sites today are mostly just online environments, and so are most multi-player games. But we are starting to see a trickle of sites and games that are making the transition into the real world. It will soon become a flood as people realise the potential.
Virtual fashion will take off, as will electronic make-up. Digital appearances will interact with make-up that contains particles aligned to electric or magnetic fields, produced by electronics printed directly and invisibly onto the skin surface.
Of course, what we use our mobiles for today most of all is for messaging, but they are still very primitive. By 2020, messaging will be much improved. You will be able to send messages to the driver of the car in front, or the person in the car next to you at the traffic lights - assuming that we still have traffic lights. If you fancy someone on a distant bar stool, you will be able to send the message just by pointing your phone in the right direction.
And then of course, the communication itself will use all of the above technologies to allow you to effectively be with the other person. You will be able to shut out the real world and see only the computer-injected images, seeing the other person in full life-sized 3D as if they were there, with 3D sound too. And the active skin will allow your nervous systems to be stimulated with signals that you already recorded before, such as what a handshake or a hug feels like. The same electronic signals will be put back into the same nerve ending they were recorded from, making communications into a full sensory experience.
And of course, it almost goes without saying that all the electronics to do all of this will be so compact it will fit into almost any piece of jewellery or onto a patch printed on your arm. So the physical phone might well have vanished into history, just three decades after it appeared.