Blog: Would Mobile Phone Know Our Mood?

Technology guru at Intel Corp. is looking into the future of smartphones, as he works on context-aware computing which might result into mobile phones that would guess your mood and TV sets would be able to tell who is watching!

Chief technology officer Justin Rattner at the annual Intel Develop Forum in San Francisco on Wednesday demonstrated how personal devices will one day offer advice that goes way beyond local restaurants and new songs to download. “How can we change the relationship so we think of these devices not as devices but as assistants or even companions?” he asked.

Mobiles with Sensory Modalities: Mobile devices could combine already common geographic location technology with data from microphones, cameras, heart and body monitors and even brain scans to offer their owners advice that today only a friend or relative could give. “Imagine a device that uses a variety of sensory modalities to determine what you are doing at an instant, from being asleep in your bed to being out for a run with a friend,” Rattner said. “Future devices will constantly learn about who you are, how you live, work and play.”

Tough Mobile Phone Competition: Intel is hurrying to catch up in the lucrative market for smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s Blackberry. Telephones with email, global positioning and media players are pointing the way to a future where ever more functions are packed into ever smaller mobile devices. The smartphone industry, including technology giants like LG and Samsung, is likely to sell 270 million phones this year and grow 25 percent in 2011, according to market research company IDC.

Context-aware Computing: “I think you can expect to see features that support context-aware computing starting to appear in Intel products in the not-too-distant future,” Rattner said. According to analysts, Intel faces an uphill battle getting its microchips into new phones as Nvidia, Marvell and Qualcomm have already made headway with cheap, lower-power processors based on designs by ARM Holdings.