There is a great deal of active research and development into mobile phone technology that is currently underway. Some of the improvements that are being worked on are:

v One difficulty in adapting mobile phones to new uses is form factor. For example, ebooks may well become a distinct device, because of conflicting form-factor requirements — ebooks require large screens, while phones need to be smaller. However, this may be solved using folding e-paper or built-in projectors.

v One function that would be useful in phones is a translation function. Currently it is only available in stand-alone devices, such as Ectaco translators.
v An important area of evolution relates to the Man Machine Interface. New solutions are being developed to create new MMI more easily and let manufacturers and operators experiment new concepts. Examples of companies that are currently developing this technology are Digital Airways with the Kaleido product, e-sim, mobile arsenal, and Qualcomm with UIOne for the BREW environment.
v Mobile phones will include various speech technologies as they are being developed. Many phones already have rudimentary speech recognition in a form of voice dialling. However, to support more natural speech recognition and translation, a drastic improvement in the state of technology in these devices is required.
v New technologies are being explored that will utilize the Extended Internet and enable mobile phones to treat a barcode as a URL tag. Phones equipped with barcode reader-enabled cameras will be able to snap photos of barcodes and direct the user to corresponding sites on the Internet. Examples of companies that are currently developing this technology are Neomedia (via Paperclick), and Scanbuy.
v Developments in miniaturised hard disks and flash drives to solve the storage space issue, therefore opening a window for phones to become portable music libraries and players similar to the iPod.
Developments in podcast software enables mobile phones to become podcast playback devices through existing channels like MMS Podcast, J2ME Podcast and AMR-NB Podcast.
v The emergence of integration capabilities with other unlicensed access technologies such as a WiMAX and WLAN, as well as allowing handover between traditional operator networks supporting GSM, CDMA and UMTS to unlicensed mobile networks. The new standard (UMA) has been developed for this.
v Further improvements in battery life will be required. Colour screens and additional functions put increasing demands on the device's power source, and battery developments may not proceed sufficiently fast to compensate. However, different display technologies, such as OLED displays, e-paper or retinal displays, smarter communication hardware (directional antennae, multi-mode and peer-to-peer phones) may reduce power requirements, while new power technologies such as fuel cells may provide better energy capacity.
v Speculative improvements in the future may be inspired by an English team led by James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau who in 2002, developed an implant designed to be inserted into a tooth during dental surgery. This device consists of a radio receiver and transducer, which transmits the sound via bone conduction through the jawbone into the ear. Sound is transmitted via radio waves from another device (ostensibly a mobile phone) and received by the implant. The implant is currently powered externally, given that no current power source is small enough to fit inside the tooth with it. In addition, the implant was only designed to receive signals, not transmit them. Directly tapping into the inner ear or the auditory nerve is already technologically feasible and will become practical as surgical methods advance.
v New technology in Japan has combined the RFID chip principle into the handset and hooked it up to a network of readers and interfaces. The system, pioneered by NTT Docomo and SonyEricsson, is called Felica and there are around 10,000 convenience stores where one can now use a phone to pay for goods just by 'swiping' it over a flat reader. By charging up a phone with pre-paid cash credits, it can act as a sophisticated mobile-phone wallet. The technology is proving popular and there are now even vending machines that accept this form of payment.
v The delivery of multimedia content including video to mobiles is beginning to become a reality with two main competing standards DMB -Digital Multimedia Broadcasting - and DVB-H - a handset version of the Digital Video Broadcasting standard. These methods avoid swamping the network by using traditional broadcasting. Turning the mobile phone into a phone + media receiving device.

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