Industry cheers itself by drawing the handset of the future

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Industry cheers itself by drawing the handset of the future

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 25 November, 2008

READ MORE: Handset

The current handset market might be in the doldrums, but that doesn't stop the industry looking forward to happier times and the shape of the smartphone to come. Chip designers are already previewing the innovations that they will showcase in February at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, where many of the blue sky developments for cellphones traditionally see the light of day. We can look forward to a phone with 32Gb of Flash memory, playing high definition video at extremely low power levels while roaming up and down the whole GSM/3G/4G spectrum.

Renesas will describe at ISSCC an applications processor that can decode 30 frames a second of H.264 video at 1080-progressive resolution while consuming just 342Mw of power and running at 500MHz. Toshiba and SanDisk are working on a 32Gb NAND Flash chip that fits into a microSD card, made in a sub-35nm process, while Canon will show off a 3.3-megapixel CMOS sensor that lowers noise by 30% to enhance video and imaging quality on phones.

Qualcomm will detail a single RF CMOS transceiver that can handle services ranging across all the GSM and UMTS bands as well as GPS, as the industry moves rapidly towards adaptive radios capable of moving intelligently between different areas of the spectrum.

Meanwhile, Nokia is looking even further into the future of the mobile device. At a recent conference, Tapani Ryhanen, head of Nokia's Cambridge, UK-based Research Center Laboratory, showing off a new cellphone concept, dubbed 'morph'. This would use embedded MEMs and other emerging technologies like accelerometers and microbolometers to enable a handset to sense its environment, as well as the health and temperature of people nearby. An array of sensors will anticipate a user's physical and emotional state and human-phone interaction will be based on various methods such pointing, looking, touching, shaking and natural verbal dialogs.

The prototype was transparent, turning the whole phone case into a display, with different dashboards to be buried at different depths in the case. Transformability, according to Ryhanen's morph concept design, will allow users to snap apart their smartphone, and reassemble it, with optional modules, to adapt its functionality for different applications- focused on GPS for walking, and then WiMAX for the office, for instance.