10 Futuristic Smartphone Features That Will Appear Soon

5. Photonic Crystal Displays

Smartphone displays are incredibly crisp, with colours so over-saturated that they make 30s Technicolor films look like bleak documentaries about urban decay in 70s New York. For all their lucidity, today's displays don't adapt well to varying light conditions; they're an eye-sore when you're looking at them in the dark, and virtually invisible in bright daylight. That's where photonic crystals come in.

Rather than giving off their own eye-searing light like today's LCD or OLED displays, a photonic crystal display adapts and modifies its nanostructures depending on the ambient light in its environment €“ sort of like an e-ink display. To be visible, the photonic screen requires an external light source, but this could easily be built into the chassis like in a Kindle PaperWhite.

How close is this to happening? Google and Apple have already made big investments in photonics, while Samsung teased a concept video of of a flexible phone with a photonic crystal display back in 2013. While we shouldn't expect this in the next year or two, it's definitely one to keep an eye on in the future.

 
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Gamer, Researcher of strange things. I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.