Check, check, check and check!

Part 3 of a 3 part post on the role of the modern smartphone

In the previous two posts I've explored the impact of the smartphone on our lives. The first post explored my hopes and aspirations for a convergence device ten years ago and how the current smartphone vastly exceeds them. The second post explored what devices it has definitely replaced or is likely to replace in the near future. In the final post I wanted to explore what's left for the smartphone to achieve. Now I'm not pretending to be a futurologist and the potential applications for the smartphone are almost limitless. Why else have Google and Apple branded themselves as mobile devices companies when neither was their core competency less than a decade ago?

The focus of my smartphone predictions won't be around the likes of location services, enhanced reality, advertising and mobile TV as many are predicting, it's something far more mundane but essential to our daily lives.

Before I do this lets explore something that I do, and I'm guessing I'm not alone here, every day before I leave the house and go to work:

Check, check, check and check!

- Have I got my wallet? Check.
- Have I got my house keys? Check.
- Have I picked up my loose change? Check.
- Have I got my mobile phone? Check.

(Note that in my case I don't drive to work but if I did I'd obviously check for my car keys too).

So could the smartphone change things here? Well when you examine all these things they resolve down to two fundamentals of life: identity and money.

In my wallet is my drivers licence (a defacto identity card), my prepaid bus ticket (currently anonymous, but in other cases not so like the London Oyster Card), my work entry card (identity), some cash (money), credit and debit cards (money) and a lottery ticket (potential money). The other items in my pockets: loose change (money) and house keys (identity) and car keys (identity). Yes I know the keys don't strictly identify me but there is an implicit assumption that because I have the key I'm authorised to use it.

So can the smartphone morph and replace the above devices. Well technically yes. There's nothing revolutionary about the concept of using a smartphone for a payment device. Nokia were talking about this sort of stuff 10 years ago and I believe that many others are working on this technology right now. Lets also not forget that I can access our bank accounts never mind ebay and paypal on my phone and that we also already access our mobile phone accounts (either pre or postpay) every time we make a call or send a text. In short it doesn't take a huge leap of faith to believe that smartphones will become payment channels in the near future.

Looking at cars we are already starting to see keys be replaced by 'dongle-based' access devices. Is it such a stretch to see your car iPod/iPhone integration extending to cover car security too? The same could be said for home security too.

This leaves us with the rest of identity. For example can you imagine your driving licence being stored on your smartphone (or a cloud server accessed by your phone) If so what about your passport or even some future DNA based identity scheme? This is where I'm probably stretching the limits of how we will use smartphones in the future but not because of some inherent technical limitations, but bureaucratic ones. Could you imagine government departments accepting smartphones for ID. And I can already hear the din from the civil libertarians.

However, if the smartphone is going to evolve in these directions then we're going to need a pretty secure way for the device to identify us. Biometrics would definitely be required in the handset for this. We're also going to need some pretty secure encryption technology to ensure that nobody is hacking our accounts through the ether.

But the important concept here is that nothing mentioned in this post is beyond the bounds to reasonable technological advances in the next few years. Considering how far the smartphone has come in such a short space of time I'm beginning to see why Apple and Google are so interested in them.