What’s the next big thing for smartphones? If I truly knew the answer to that question, I’d probably already be on a nice tropical island somewhere, laughing at those poor folks charged with making that next big thing a reality. Truth is, I don’t know, nor does anyone but the consumer. I do know one thing, though — power optimization, already very important, is going to become even more important in the coming years. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, but some of the big ones include:

Multimedia

The feature curve for multimedia in smartphones is flattening out as we start approaching consumer electronics equivalency in terms of audio and video playback, for example. And in the not so distant future, a typical smartphone will capture and playback 1080p video. You will be able to watch videos from your phone at 1080p resolution via an HDMI connection to your TV. Once this becomes standard fare, most of the big-ticket feature evolution is complete. I know there will still be new features — no doubt about that — but the rate of new feature addition will slow down, with a shift from feature addition to feature optimization. And these MM features use lots of power, so power optimization for multimedia will start consuming a greater proportion of total multimedia R&D effort in the coming years.

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