My belief is that many future mobile innovations will be borne out of the realities of the developing world. In my "developed" world, where friends leave household appliances on standby for weeks on end, energy efficient mobile devices are seen as something of a luxury. For a mobile phone owner in, say, Uganda -- with little access to mains electricity -- it's more of a necessity.

I also believe -- along with many others -- that as devices get smarter, faster and more powerful, the challenges of power consumption will continue to consume large chunks of R&D effort. The recent announcement from the Chinese Academy of Sciences of a highly-efficient solar cell that can effectively be embedded in plastic could give us a glimpse of a future where the housing of mobile phones become one large solar panel. Advances in harnessing kinetic energy could also give us self-charging mobiles, akin to our already-present self-winding watches. Perhaps the challenges of keeping mobile devices powered up will lead to a convergence where a number of charging technologies are present in a single device.

Looking even further ahead, mobile devices may also be chargeable wirelessly. Perhaps by a method of charging via the same wireless networks that carry our mobile signal. I'd hate to think about the health implications of this, or how inefficient these charging networks might be, but it's not out-of-the-question that this becomes reality. Again, this technology would most likely emerge from developing countries, where vast numbers of potential customers are excluded from phone ownership because they lack of access to power to charge them. Whether this wireless charging future happens before the converged renewable option discussed remains to be seen.

Winding the clock back to my childhood, and returning to the original question of what the future might look like, a young Ken Banks might draw a picture of a single device that seamlessly docks, morphs or switches between fixed desktop and portable wireless device.

Despite the march of the integrated mobile device, we're still some way off making them as easy and convenient to use as our old friend the computer. The fact that I choose to write this on my laptop is a case in point. Once I leave my laptop at home --assuming I own one -- and start writing regularly on my phone, maybe I'll finally know that my future has arrived.