So your cell phone can take and send pictures, even video. You can text message and download ring tones and games. You can even watch television and do some web browsing with UMTS. But if you're person who's been using mobile phones for a number of yerars, you can appreciate just how far they have come since the early days when we carried around bricks in dubiously bright neoprene covers, and simply trying to get a phone and service required the kind of stringent credit checks associated with entry to the bank of England.

The cell phones of the future may not look radically different, but they will enable users to do a lot more and a lot differently. High speed data access usinfgmobile broadband, high quality video playback and over the air downloads, high quality video cameras, or live and time shift broadcast Tv and radio, and a posse of location position finding applications, besides ever growing memory and storage capacity, are just some of the functionalities on the horizon.

The biggest and most obvious change is the rapid take up of mobile phones. Twelve years ago, the were only for the whealthy. Seven years ago they were still very rare. Now there more mobiles phones than households in Europe, and numbers are still growing fast.

Today there's no real difference between your mobile phone and your PDA. Motorola has introduced a phone, the much heralder Rokr, that runs Apples Itunes while Sony Ericsson already has mp3 phones on the market which can hold up to 1500 songs. Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, will be introducng music playing handsets which are able to store thousands of tracks which play in stereo. Some sets even include FM radio.

Now with the latest wifi systems there is also the possibility to connect to your home or office wifi security webcam so you can constantly secure the premises.

The next generation of cell phones seems all set to be a comination of phones, PDAs, global positioning systems, digital cameras and handheld gaming devices. However, the next generation of mobile phones will be just one facet of the technologies that are likely to come together. Servers must run the host software in the case of interactive entertainment software and networks that connect the phones with these servers are also needed.

Future efforts to optimize power supply sysyems for mobile devices will increasingly involve the use of multiple power generation technologies with an electric buffer store. In order to achieve maximum power utilization with the highest degree of efficiency, a system of intelligent power management is needed. The goal is to link the energy delivere by batteries, solar cells, thermoelectric or fuel cells in a device. With this kind of system, a laptop could switch to fuel cells whenever light conditions were favourable.

The local phone company's last line of defence is Internet access. Will local phone services still be required to connect to a DSL or dial up Internet connection? Today you can hook up your laptop or desktop computer through your cell phone and UMTS connection giving you nearly the same ADSL speed as your local isp so who needs a land line?