Here are a few predictions as we look into the crystal ball (and listen to the rumours).

For the first time we will see smartphones with Intel inside. For some time Intel has been considering entering the smartphone market, and finally it has developed a chip targeted at tomorrow’s advanced smartphones. Intel has adapted their processor architectures developed for the PC market for mobile devices including smartphones and tablets. Their major challenge has been to achieve the relatively low levels of power consumption that have been achieved by ARM, who have designed the current generation of processors such as the Snapdragon for Android smartphones.

Microsoft is targeting cloud applications with its new Mango operating system which will appear in Nokia smartphones either late 2011 or early 2012. They intend to compete head on with Android powered phones, but we will just have to wait and see how effective this is going to be.

3D technologies have been the buzz of 2011 and already we have seen the first fully 3D smartphone appear on the market which can even record and play back 720p 3D video. Will we see many more examples of 3D phones appear in 2012 or is 3D just a passing fad?

Faster processers are on the way which will provide a much smoother user experience. The latest 2011 phone from Samsung is the Galaxy S II and that has a 1.2GHz processor, so what might we expect in 2012? Perhaps we could be seeing 1.5GHz dual core processors or even faster. However, the problem is that there is a direct correlation between processor aped and power consumption which brings us to our final point which is…

Battery life. The major problem with today’s smartphones is that we always have to recharge them. What we want is better battery life and this means better batteries. We are aware of some research programmes at various US universities which are attempting to develop nanotechnology batteries which will charge up in just a few minutes – so when are we going to get them in our smartphones?

If you want to view the current smartphones visit http://www.phones4u.co.uk