There’s no way around it – smartphones have revolutionised the way we do business, carry out decisions on what to buy or where to visit and how we talk and organise social events with our friends. However, it may not stay quite like this for long – one of the exciting things about the new mobile world in which we live is the way it continuously changes. Trends are invented, are developed, and are often ditched without some people even knowing. In this article, we take a tentative look at the latest smartphone web trends you can expect to see.
Payment with phones
This is already a bit of a thing – online money merchants such as Paypal have already begun streamlining their app services to enable you to transfer money quickly and efficiently between themselves and a variety of online stores. Expect to see more of this kind of thing as 2015 progresses – Apple Pay and Google Wallet are, as you would expect, the big players here.
Apps will learn even more about us
Most smartphones already know where we are, where we’ve been and where we’re likely to go in the future – but in the coming months we should expect this to diversify a bit and take into consideration what we’ve purchased and provide recommendations on other items we might need and shops in the vicinity that might be of interest to us.
Health
There’s been a bit of buzz around this one in recent years, and the hype is only looking likely to grow as new apps and devices are released to connect to our existing smartphones. Things need to become smarter, and most apps and services such as Apple and Google Health are in their infancy at the moment, but with the advent of smarter wearables in 2015 and better connectivity between them and our devices, we could start to reply on our smartphones to keep good tracks of our health, diet and exercise regimes.
Home Control
For a long time this looked like it’d be reserved for the people who would want to pay for it – but the philosophy of the ‘internet of things’ sets to become far more accessible in terms of availability and price in 2015. More things around the home, from lighting to the heating systems, are being controlled from smartphones and there’s a lot left to become ‘smart’ – expect to see this in the coming years too. One of the nice things about having this feature around the home is that lots of aspects can be programmed – could we in the future programme to have our house cleaned, warmed up and our food cooked before we walk through the door?
More wireless
Wireless charging is beginning to take off, and so it should. Long gone should be the days of trailing our wires all around our house – the technology is likely to be refined – but expect this to happen in the coming months and expect the ability to choose between wired and wireless charging on almost all phones soon. It won’t be just charging either – expect music, gaming and even lighting controls to be almost entirely wireless soon.