Imagine a phone with an image sensor to rival today's most expensive SLRs, Full HD video capture to shame professional camcorders and internet access 10 times faster than today's broadband.
Ericsson of Sweden, Sony's mobile comms partner, reckons we'll be seeing such handsets not in 20 years or even 10, but in time for the London Olympic Games.
It revealed its 2012 predictions during a press conference yesterday to big up its 3G+ HSDPA technology, which is a due a speed boost to 21Mbps with its 'evolution' upgrade this winter.
Tech-On! reports that Ericsson Director Jonas Lundstedt said. "We have an image of a mobile terminal equipped with digital camera and camcorder capabilities of the future."
PC power in your hand
The phones will sport image chips from 12 to 20MP, shoot 1080p video and play back media on a XGA (1024x768-pixel) screen. Inside, a 1GHz chip will crunch its way through full-scale applications, and the wireless LTE (Long Term Evolution) 4G connection will reach speeds of up to 100Mbps.
Lundstedt backed up his crystal ball-gazing with some history: "W-CDMA, which has a maximum speed of 384Kbps, emerged in about 2002. The capacity of data transmission has grown 60 times larger in the six years since then."
Ericsson predicts LTE technology to arrive first in ultra-connected countries like Japan.