Although you may already be knocked out by the whiz bang multimedia broadband capabilities of the latest generation of cell telephones, these are going to seem like CB radios by the time that 4G cell telephone technology becomes the norm. You think 3G phones are pretty hot stuff? Then just wait and see what's coming next!

Mobile telephone providers and developers are already working furiously away at the next generation of tech-wizardry. What is it going to be like? What will it be able to? And will it make me young again?

Well, of course, you can expect your phone in the future to be able to do everything your current phone can do, a hundred times better. You can chuck out that dusty old quad-core Macbook, too, that's not even going to be suitable for playing Tetris by the time the fourth generation of cell telephones comes along!

Surfing the web will be vastly improved due to higher speeds and larger screens, and you'll be able to shop online, using your cell phone as a kind of electronic wallet. So you can finally throw that away too! You'll also be able to watch smooth, high resolution, video and television in real time, and be able to download and keep 100s of HD-quality movies and thousands of audiophile grade sound files, making all your mp3 players and portable DVD sets redundant overnight.

And last, but by no means least, your cell telephone signal is going to become one heck of a lot clearer, due to the fact that 4G cell telephones will be able to tap into a number of different cells at once, and pick the strongest signal at any given microsecond. Third generation phones can only work with a single cell at a time, which can lead to signal inconsistencies when you wander between transmitter zones, but this won't happen when the fourth generation rolls around.

All well and good, when is it happening then The initial idea was to bring in 4G protocol in Tokyo in late twenty ten, but due to the unprecedented increases in consumer demand for mobile phones, and the technological advances of recent years, it is looking like it will turn up earlier than anticipated, and should be appearing in a mobile phone showroom near you later this year or early in twenty ten, initially as a premium product.

However, as we have found, it is not long before these initially expensive luxury devices tumble in price, thanks to the simple maxim that greater returns are to be had on the mass market, and we can anticipate that 4G phones to be given away free with the majority of phone contracts by 2012, as is currently the case with 3G phones from firms such as Vodafone and O2.