[TheOtherHobbes]

For many services the phone is just a relatively dumb front end, and the actual computing happens on cloudy clusters elsewhere.

Given that Moore's Law is creaking I wouldn't expect pocket petaflops any time soon. I'd expect a serious outbreak of cloudy clusters everywhere, and perhaps a dynamically reconfigurable Internet 2.0 with completely transparent non-localised computation.

This might change if computing finally goes optical and/or quantum. But if we're pushing electrons around wires, current hardware is close to the physical limits. The only way to speed it up is to build a lot more of it and speed up the connections.