Smartphone hardware is in the 9th inning. These devices have mostly hit the natural limits of what's achievable for now. Bad for Apple since this effectively levels the playing field.
Flexible displays would certainly be neat, but their utility for a cellphone largely escapes me.
Wearable peripherals are a different category, they're not smartphones. Regardless, I dont have terribly high hopes for these future devices.
Mobile payment is mostly not a hardware issue. It's a software issue and a matter of coordination or market forces selecting a standard or two. It's things like THIS that are the next battleground in mobile: services and integration.
They are in rectangular boxes because that shape, for various reasons, happens to be extraordinarily efficient. TV's haven't changed shapes.
I think smartphone hardware is pretty much dead. The major leaps - touch screens (which is so ridiculously underappreciated as an innovation), HD screens, HD cameras, CPU horsepower, nice OS's, voice recognition, blah blah - are behind us. There is a reason that almost all of the best selling smartphones look alike, feel alike, and generally have the exact same feature sets. The differences between each other, in the grand scheme of things, are lamentably minute.
These are great points. To add to your list - I'd love it if as part of mobile payments they do what's needed to completely replace a wallet.
If I'm at a restaurant paying for a drink with my phone, I should also be able to send them a verified copy of my id with photo and age. Then I could stop carrying a wallet entirely.
Integration with low power peripherals will be nice, but don't forget about high powered peripherals like tablets and tvs. If I put down my phone right now and pick up a tablet, I should be able to finish typing this comment with no interruption.
Usually, but not always. In 2007, it turned out that the available technology allowed something way better than what was actually being sold. Apple realized this and used this fact to go from zero to smartphone dominance nearly overnight. Gaps do happen, they just don't last long before someone comes along and gets rich by exploiting them.
Except that Apple just doubled the processing power. That, with everyone else now needing (and, given a year, able) to catch up & exceed, is hardly "the natural limits of what's achievable for now". The processing power curve shows no sign of slowing down, and with wireless tech racing past LTE toward 100Mb territory meaning local storage capacity becomes a mere buffer instead of a limit, we're nowhere near "natural limits".
The only limit we face now is users finding sufficient aggregate need for all that power & bandwidth. Build AppleTV into a touchable monitor, drop a wireless keyboard on the desk, and eliminate that 4" bottleneck for most users - BAM, death blow to Windows etc.
The iPad 3 pushes 2,048 by 1,536 pixels. A single monitor 30" requires 2560 x 1600 (or maybe less, if it's crap). So ... I can see an iPhone being able to drive a single 30" monitor some time soon.
People will be using their phones as desktops (if not serious workstations) sometime soon. And once they use them as desktops, phones won't be fast enough until they have performance comparable to workstations (which, as you point out, won't happen).
Why not? If it doesn't melt while being maximally used in my hands, why should it be thermally impossible to put it on the table while connected to an external screen?
The processor is more powerful than many old computers, and the 30" screens need no more pixels than the iPhone screen already has.
I wonder if it would be practical couple the CPU directly to an externally accessible thermal pad, and have some sort of docking station which includes additional cooling. There are probably better cooling options available (liquid, heatpipe?) if you could find a way to connect/disconnect them reliably and not compromise much on the mobile aspects of the design.
Yes, it would be very useful to have a single OS image that could scale its user interface and capabilities to the hardware it finds attached at any given moment.
OSX already does this. Got a base model Macbook Air and a big powerful iMac or Mac Pro? Connect a thunderbolt or a firewire cable and boot in target disk mode, you'll boot from the Air's hard drive but get the full hardware capabilities of your iMac or Pro (better GPU, more CPU power, whatever).
Flexible displays are coming soon.
The paths for easy integration with multiple low power wearable peripherals have just been forged, and the area is still in its infancy.
Mobile payments have not fully arrived yet.
The phones are all still in rectangular boxes - something that will look ridiculous in 20 years.
I think there is a lot yet to come hardware-wise.