-I sense an old phone trying to contact you.
I can see in your past a time
when a new smartphone launch was excited,
but, lately, your phone has been getting boring.
You want something more, a phone that doesn't look
identical to the one from four years ago.
I'm Washington Post tech columnist Geoff Fowler,
and today I'm putting on my psychic hat
and looking into my crystal ball
at the future of our favorite gadget, the smartphone.
[whir! ]
A lot of what's made phones more useful in recent years
has come through apps and artificial intelligence,
not new designs.
That's gonna keep happening,
but I see a surprising amount of innovation on the horizon
that's gonna keep pushing phones forward, backward,
and all sorts of directions.
Let's start by traveling to a future that already exists.
I'm gonna show you a magic trick using this phone,
called the Vivo X21.
Like so many other phones now, it's all screen on the front,
but I can use my thumb to unlock it -- like that.
Chinese smartphone makers Vivo and Xiaomi
are the first to use tech from a company called Synaptics
that puts the fingerprint sensor behind the screen.
I expect to see in-display fingerprint sensors
on Samsung and other phones you can get in the U.
S. next year.
Vivo also did away with the unsightly notch
for the front-facing camera
by making it pop up in this phone, called the NEX.
Just don't let that thing snap off.
Speaking of cameras, I see in your future
a phone that can seriously compete with big, fancy cameras.
How?
Check out this prototype phone from a company called Light
that has nine lenses.
Yes, nine.
The idea is, if they all shoot at the same time,
those images can be combined
into a single high-resolution photo
that's capable of capturing low light
and sophisticated depth effects.
The lens race is already on.
This P20 Pro phone from Huawei
is the first to have three lenses on the black.
One is for color photos, one for zoom,
and one black-and-white to help you in the dark.
Now let's look deeper.
I see, in a past life, you had a folding phone, a flip phone.
I see it coming back, but very different --
more like a folding tablet that's also a phone.
Fans of the HBO show "Westworld" might have seen
its near-futuristic concept of a folding computer.
This design isn't just science fiction.
Last year, Chinese phone maker
ZTE came out with a dual-screen phone called the Axon M.
The next step is a phone that folds up without any hinges.
For a few years, Samsung has been teasing technology
for bendable OLED screens that don't break.
And, recently, other display makers such as China's BOE
have begun showing off bendable screen tech, too,
like this book-style phone at a recent trade show.
Industry watchers think we'll see a phone
that does this from Samsung as soon as next year.
So, my fellow futurists,
where does the phone go in the long run?
My crystal ball gets a little hazy 10 years out,
but it seems to indicate the smartphone as we know
it might just disappear [whir!
] and be replaced by glasses.
Wait, wasn't Google Glass a giant flop?
Yes, it was, but there's some reason to think
it was just ahead of its time.
Augmented-reality tech,
already available through phone cameras and screens,
overlays useful information like directions
or Pok?mon critters onto the real world.
Now imagine if we could get that info
without having to look at our phones.
Well-funded startups such as Magic Leap
are working on their own mixed-reality headgear
that has yet to come out.
Apple watchers think they're working on some, too.
Already today you can devices like these $400 AR DreamGlasses
that project information from a phone onto these glasses,
so it looks like it's in front of you like this.
Welcome to the future!
Okay, it might not look exactly like this,
but the smartphone of science fiction
might be reality sooner than you think.
I see an upgrade in your future.