The smartness of a smartphone is currently defined by its hardware specifications and the operating system that powers it. But this is all set to change with a new breed of smartphones that will pre-empt your every move. Think about phones that change settings automatically according to the occasion without you having to tell it to do anything. Think about it monitoring your vital signs and telling you to slow down or head for a workout depending on your activity level. You phone is going to become much smarter than you can imagine.

Apple and Google drove the concept of a smartphone being your personal assistant searching things on the Internet for you, telling you whether you should pack woolens on your upcoming vacation, firing up the track you feel like listening to or simply telling you how your day looks like. Google Now can even prompt you when to leave in order to make it to the next meeting on time.

We can already see smartphones becoming more aware of their surroundings thanks to apps like Qualcomm’s Battery Guru. The app understands the user’s behaviour pattern and tweaks the Wi-Fi settings according to your location. So it turns Wi-Fi on whenever it senses you are at home or office where you have Wi-Fi access while turns it off when you are not at a place where you have accessed a Wi-Fi network before, thus saving precious battery.

While such software driven apps and services can be of so much help, yet you end up missing important calls on the same phone just because the phone was in your pocket and the vibration mode wasn’t turned on or it was in a handbag in silent mode. Some smartphones go into silent mode when you place them face down on the table but next generation devices will be more aware of their surroundings and will have the capability to react accordingly. These phones will automatically turn on the vibration mode when they sense they are placed in a pocket or increase the ringtone loudness when in a handbag. A combination of the ambient light and movement pattern sensed by sensors on the device will trigger the action.

Think about this - the phone detects you are travelling in a car as it can sense it is moving at speeds much faster than you can walk or run and it automatically gets into the car mode that reads out text messages and names the caller rather than playing the ringtone. It also gets into the voice command and speaker mode allowing you to give commands like “Call Mom” or “Play Daft Punk”. As soon as the car comes to a halt, the phone automatically goes into the normal mode.

The phone will automatically light up a notification display when it senses you have picked it up and are looking at it. Motorola’s upcoming smartphone, the Moto X, has a feature that turns on the “personal assistant” mode as soon as you say a command (ok Moto X) without having to touch the phone.

“The Moto X is more contextually aware of what’s around it. It anticipates my needs,” Dennis Woodside, Motorola’s CEO, revealed at a conference last month. However, it is unlikely to be the only smartphone with such capabilities in the coming months.

With next generation devices, you won’t have to trigger the camera by pressing a button or hitting an onscreen icon. Instead, just holding the phone in the landscape mode away from you (the pose one makes while clicking a photo) will be enough to do the trick. And the camera will capture much more details. Currently, phones capture a lot of meta data with photographs that include the settings, the time and geo-location. But there’s something missing.

“Can a photo tell you whether the leaves on the trees were blowing in the wind? Can it take you back to the moment? Very soon they will,” Sami Niemi, who heads Nokia’s imaging team told me at the sidelines of the launch of the Lumia 1020, which has a monstrous 41-megapixel camera. “A lot of moments are lost as we capture them while looking through the viewfinder.”

In the future, you will click photos while looking at the scene unravelling in front of you rather than what you see on the phone’s display. And yet, everything you click will come out perfect with new-age camera sensors that collect more details than conventional sensors and will let you play around with photos long after they have been clicked. In other words, these photos will stay alive.

An array of low-power sensors are making their way into smartphones and other smart devices. Next generation smartphones and accessories will be able to monitor not just the inorganic aspects but also your vital signs to become even more aware. Smart wrist bands are already making their way into markets that monitor the user’s activity and some even record pulse beat, body temperature and other vital stats. Expect these to be integrated directly into smartphones considering it is one device we have on us almost all the time. These smartphones will monitor your activity and urge you to head for a workout if you haven’t moved around for a while. They will know if you are dehydrated and remind you to sip water.

(The writer is the Executive Editor of www.bgr.in)

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