1. Flip Phones / Folding Phones

Remember the Motorola Razr? That was ill. At various times flip has come back and driven Motorola to fortune — think the Startac or Razr. Motorola’s phone biz is now owned by Google, so anything is possible.

The next medium thing could be a touchscreen flip. In it’s most elegant solution imagine a fully touch surface (front, back, maybe even sides). It starts as iPhone size, then you fold it open to make something the size of a Galaxy Note.

If displays get thinner (and cheaper) you could theoretically keep folding it out. Could be a phone in your pocket, a iPad Mini when you fold it out, or a full tablet if you fold it further.

2. Full Touch

Like the strip club holy grail, the world is still waiting on full touch. Why is touch limited to one side of the phone? Why not all over? Why not make everything touch, everything capable of displaying information. Instead of that cognitively befuddling wall of tiles on your homescreen, why not move some apps to dedicated buttons along the side?

Instead of worrying about aluminum vs. plastic, why not make the whole thing a display.

3. Craftsmanship

Plastic is shit and slabs are boring. Why couldn’t future phones have more leather and metals and old school charm? At this point the tech and innards are becoming near indistinguishable. At the same time, physical design has largely stagnated on some variation of the iPhone.

At one point feature phones saw a huge renaissance of shapes and sizes. Why not return to that, except with a hipster eye to materials and construction. Brooklyn?

4. Modularity

From Kickstarter to the conglomerate, modular phones are going from idea to implementation fast. The basic idea is that you have standard components that you can replace/upgrade/swap as needed. If everything looks like a homogenous slab anyways, why not make the parts swappable?

5. Human Siri

In wartime Sri Lanka the illest Army Commanders didn’t have cellphones. They had a dude that followed them with a folding table and a CDMA phone. When they wanted to take a call they sat down at a desk and took a call. That’s gangster.

I’m not proposing that everyone have a dude follow them with a folding office (but if you’re really gangster, you really should). Instead, what if you had a human concierge in your phone. Siri is OK, but not really, and why not create jobs for thousands of people (Sri Lanka has good English you know) instead of making dozens of engineers rich?

Imagine if you had, like, a secretary in your phone, handling multiple people from some location abroad.