Mobile tech under Obama

During the next four years, mobile technology will undergo change you can believe in

E-books will challenge paper books. Amazon.com will dominate with future Kindles

, but the biggest alternative will be reading on high-resolution mobile phones. The idea of reading on paper will become thought of as a quaint throwback to a bygone era, and used mainly by old rich people, especially for newspapers and magazines.

Live TV will become a thing of the past. Everyone will watch TV either in "clip" form on mobile phones, or high-def DVR recordings on their real TV. The use of live streaming content online and on mobile phones will rise, and the consumption of live TV will decline. Eventually, people will forget that TVs used to be live and online media used to be asynchronous. TV will become like music. Instead of getting the whole show (like you used to get the whole album), you'll watch TV segments a la carte.

Tablet PCs will work like the iPhone. The new iPhone-like desktops will be available for very deep-pocketed users, and applications will be limited. But tablet PCs, led by Apple itself, will have iPhone-like multi-touch user interfaces and find broad acceptance. Remember CNN's John King and his "Magic Map" during the election? Tablet PCs will work like that.

Mobile phones will eat more gadgets. Stand-alone media players and GPS devices will go the way of the dodo as all mobile phones handle these jobs brilliantly. Digital camera sales will start declining as camera-phone quality improves.

The mobile industry will be unrecognizable. Apple will dominate and compete mainly with Android-based phones. Palm will die. RIM, Motorola and Nokia will become also-ran companies because their respective core competencies will be commoditized and marginalized. Microsoft will be an also-ran in consumer mobile, but will do well in the enterprise.

Videoconferencing will go mainstream. Most high-end mobile phones will have a second camera on the front, so users can look at who they're talking to on screen while the camera beams their own visage to the other caller. Futurists have been predicting this since the 30s, and companies have been working on it since the 50s. It will finally happen when Apple puts a second camera on an iPhone some time during the next two years.

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Tags mobile phonesBarack Obama

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