Introduction

Mobile computing is one of the most important and controversial topics in technology today. It's abilities and applications increase on a regular basis and form an ever changing and ever expanding mobile landscape. Soon enough it won't matter whether someone is sitting at home on their desktop or on their smartphone on the bus, the capabilities and connections will be the same. This report is to outline the future predictions for mobile computing in 2025 and provide some information into the topic's past and present as well. As this course is based online the implications of mobile computing on education were also included as it is a relevant to both this assignment and topic. Mobile computing has progressed exponentially over the last ten years and will continue to flourish and improve over the next ten.

What is Mobile Computing?

Wikipedia defines mobile computing as “human-computer interaction by which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage, which allows for transmission of data, voice and video.” There are three major components to mobile computing and they include communication, hardware and software. Many of the innovations in each sector depend on the evolution of another to provide support and render them viable.

Mobile technologies are what connects our real world experiences with the digital landscape, whether it’s social, academic or in the workplace. Since these devices are designed to be portable many of them are hand held or are small and light enough to be worn without being restrictive. Mobile devices consist of many of the same components and software abilities as a regular desktop computer; such as internet connection, microprocessors, data storage and memory. Examples of these devices include smartphones, laptops, wearable technology (glasses, watches etc.), tablets, cameras, carputers and handheld game consoles. There are also many wireless extensions to these technologies through low radius networks like Bluetooth and Airplay, which include objects such as speakers, keyboards, headsets, mice and displays.

Data plans and Wi-Fi have enabled Mobile computing to thrive, especially with the rate at which new and improved networks have and will become available with faster connections and larger radiuses. Every day we as humans become more connected than the last and we have mobile computing to thank for it.

Education

Mobile computing is one of the most controversial topics in the world of higher education. Almost every student and teacher in the current educational environment has some sort of mobile technology, which they use for both personal and academic reasons. Due to this trend many institutions have been investigating methods of integrating new technologies to improve the educational experiences they offer. Academia isn’t the only field where mobile computing has the ability to improve it, administrative and organizational processes can be streamlined and completed more efficiently through new technologies and networks.

One pressing implication regarding the future of higher education is the impending plateau of technological advancement and the shift of importance to the mobility of the students and faculty. Many institutions in modern education centre much of their programs around apps and mobile websites to make information more accessible for people on the go, thought the next step will be complete integration on a platform that would resemble certain social network platforms such as Facebook. By 2025 the entire educational landscape will change partly because of mobile computing and it’s capabilities, as it has in the last ten years. In the past people needed to go to a library to find what they need but now almost anything can be found at the click of a button and soon it won’t make a difference whether people are using their desktops or mobile devices.

Mobile Scales

As the world’s demand for education increases along with the prevalence of mobile technology, opportunities arise in institutions ability to cater their educational experiences to their students on a more personal level. Theses opportunities will provide students with access to increasing amounts of information at the touch of a screen. Mobile devices would become an educational concierge of sorts serving relevant information wherever and whenever needed.

This doesn’t only have implications in education; we will be able to carry our entire lives around with us in our pockets, whatever the situation may be. By 2025 with the internet of thing becoming more and more popular the scale and ability of mobile technologies will skyrocket to the point where we will likely have the abilities of a full sized computer in the palms of our hands.

Augmented Mobile Realities

As mobile devices become increasingly popular they will become filters through which we view reality. These filters would be considered a form of augmented reality, which is essentially a live view of a real world environment that has been enhanced by an overlay of computer generated imaging to serve a purpose such as photo editing or gathering contextual information. Certain examples of this Augmented Reality are projects like HealthCARe, which provides students at City University with the ability to find relevant information on health care issues simply pointing their phone at something. Another prime example of this technology is the SCARLET project out of the University of Manchester that uses Augmented Reality to make extremely rare books more accessible to students and provide them with additional information to improve their research and educational abilities. In the future this technology has the ability to completely revitalize how we all gain and process information both in education and our every day lives.

The Internet of Things

“The history of our recent technologies is one of carefully repackaging the artifacts of our lives in smaller and smaller boxes.” (Ben Showers, 09/29/2012)

The most prominent form of this trend is in fact mobile computing; currently that consists of mainly mobile phones and tablets but new wearable technologies such as the Google glasses and the Apple Watch are becoming more and more prevalent. These wearable technologies are only possible because of the emergence of Augmented Reality and they represent the growing connection between our physical bodies and technology.

With the rate of innovation and technological development that has only continued to increase in the last number of years we can expect our mobile formats and vehicles to change drastically by 2025.

As personalised as devices are now in the future they will only become more so which will impact what students will expect from their educational experiences. Most higher education institutions use a bring your own device model to their teaching styles but in future this may cause support issues as there will be a variety of available mediums.

Future Devices

By 2025 we should expect to see many innovations in mobile hardware with features such as flexible screens, built-in projectors, seamless voice control, 3-D displays and holograms.

As of today there are about two internet-connected devices for every person alive and by 2025 experts forecast that this ratio will increase to over 6 per person. This means that it is likely that there will be approximately 50 billion devices connected to the internet over the course of the next decade.

These devices won’t be limited to the formats we have today, by 2025 many of the everyday objects we take for granted will be interconnected through new technology to serve a bigger purpose. Many of our clothes will be integrated with different forms of technology whether it be sensors to react with our devices or them actually become devices themselves. By 2025 the landscape of available devices will change drastically, especially if you look at the progression of mobile computing over the last 10 years and predictions for the next 10.

Communication and Networks

Currently we are more connected than ever with advanced networks and communication systems, which enable us to communicate with the outside world from wherever we are. Telecommunication and text messaging run mainly through standard signals but the majority of our mobile apps, games and tools require internet access through data networks to function to their full potential. Currently these data networks are running with a 4G connection, which stands for the 4th generation of this technology. Within the next 3-5 years the 5th Generation of the network (or 5G) will be ready for release, which will include many upgrades in terms of speed, total bandwidth, overall coverage and improved latency over previous generations. This improved network is expected to generate much more revenue for tech companies upon release due to the explosion of new applications and services becoming available because of the broadband like speeds of 5G. Revenues for 5G services will exceed $65 billion by 2025 according to a forecast done by Juniper research. Some experts also expect 5G to overcome many in-home networks and become the primary source of internet connectivity as they begin to match and outpace broadband networks in data transfer speeds and accessibility. New services that will become more common due to this technology include self-driving cars, 4K and 8K video and improved augmented realities; new devices will also become increasingly more viable as these networks continue to offer improved functionality and connectivity to the world around us. The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance has a specific list of requirements which outlines the capabilities a network must have to be considered 5th Generation.

They Include:

• Data rates of several tens of megabits per second should be supported for tens of thousands of users

• 1 gigabit per second to be offered simultaneously to many workers on the same office floor

• Several hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections to be supported for massive sensor deployments

• Spectral efficiency should be significantly enhanced compared to 4G

• Coverage should be improved

• Signaling efficiency should be enhanced

• Latency should be reduced significantly compared to LTE.

(Retrieved from: http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2016/03/31/5g-mobile-networks-next-big-battleground/id=67632/)

By 2025 5G will have been out for at least a few years and will have had the time to spread and become available in many areas. With the forecasted specifications that have been announced we can expect 5G to be a significant improvement over the 4G-LTE networks we have today. The 2011 IDC Digital Universe study predicted that by 2020 the amount of overall data worldwide will increase by 50 times, largely due to sensors in clothing, buildings, medical devices and more. They even speculate that business executives will have a difficult time finding qualified people to analyse it all. To put it in perspective by the mid 1940s human knowledge was doubling every 25 years but today in 2016 our knowledge is doubling on average every 13 months. IBM claims that the internet of things will eventually double our knowledge every 12 hours. With our consumption rates, file sizes and overall amount of data increasing this 5th generation network will have its work cut out for it. With compression also becoming more advanced we can expect that by 2025 the hardware, software and networks will have ironed out the kinks in this new network to provide a seamless mobile experience.

Conclusion

When our generation was going through primary and secondary school our teachers always told us that we wouldn’t always have a calculator on us, which has obviously proved to be untrue. Now our teachers tell us that it is impossible to have every piece of information you need when you need it but jokes on them, it’s already happening and will only improve. They say our mobile phones are more powerful than the computers that first put a man on the moon which really puts into perspective how far we’ve come, and how far we can go if we continue to progress as we have.

Sources

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How the Internet Of Things Will Change Almost Everything. (n.d.). Retrieved April 12, 2016, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/12/17/how-the-internet-of-things-will-change-almost-everything/#24c6d19756d7

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