Future prospects

There is a great deal of active research and development into mobile phone technology that is currently underway. Some of the improvements that are being worked on are:

One difficulty in adapting mobile phones to new uses is form factor. For example, ebooks may well become a distinct device, because of conflicting form-factor requirements — ebooks require large screens, while phones need to be smaller. However, this may be solved using folding e-paper or built-in projectors.
One function that will be useful in phones is translation function. Currently it is only available in stand-alone devices, such as Ectaco translators.
mobile phones will include various speech technologies as they are being developed. Many phones already have rudimentary speech recognition in a form of voice dialling. Of particular interest will be real-time voice translation (that must include speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis). However, more natural speech recognition and translation in these devices requires a drastic improvement in the state of technology: the phone's processor must be faster by several orders of magnitude with the phone requiring far more internal memory, or new ways of processing speech data must be found. Natural language processing requires inordinately powerful hardware.
developments in miniaturised hard disks to solve the storage space issue, therefore opening a window for phones to become portable music libraries and players similar to the iPod.
the emergence of integration capabilities with other unlicensed access technologies such as a WiMAX and WLAN, as well as allowing handover between traditional operator networks supporting GSM, CDMA and UMTS to unlicensed mobile networks.
further improvements in battery life will be required. Colour screens and additional functions put increasing demands on the device's power source, and battery developments may not proceed sufficiently fast to compensate. However, different display technologies, such as OLED displays, e-paper or retinal displays, smarter communication hardware (directional antennae, multi-mode and peer-to-peer phones) may reduce power requirements, while new power technologies such as fuel cells may provide better energy capacity.
Speculative improvements in the future may be inspired by an English team led by James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau who in 2002, developed an implant designed to be inserted into a tooth during dental surgery. This device consists of a radio receiver and transducer, which transmits the sound via bone conduction through the jawbone into the ear. Sound is transmitted via radio waves from another device (ostensibly a mobile phone) and received by the implant. The implant is currently powered externally, given that no current power source is small enough to fit inside the tooth with it. In addition, the implant was only designed to receive signals, not transmit them. Directly tapping into the inner ear or the auditory nerve is already technologically feasible and will become practical as surgical methods advance.