5 smartphone innovations coming in 2015

Think that brand-new smartphone in your pocket is pretty cool? In just a few short months it’ll be officially obsolete. In early 2015, the first phones with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 chip will arrive on store shelves, and they’re going to power all kinds of new experiences in the next generation of mobile devices.

Qualcomm Snapdragon processors power virtually all of today’s top-tier phones that aren’t iPhones. Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry — if it’s a flagship device (or close), chances are it packs a Snapdragon (although Nvidia’s Tegra line and Samsung’s home-grown chips make rare but notable appearances here and there).

A smartphone or tablet’s processor is the backbone of the entire experience. Every app, every push notification, every pixel is controlled by the CPU (although graphics are sometimes handled by a separate GPU). Greater computational power means enhanced abilities, and the company’s best chip on the market today — the Snapdragon 805 — enables experiences like the virtual reality environment on the Samsung Gear VR(created by a Qualcomm-poweredGalaxy Note 4).

The Snapdragon 810 will level-up things even further. In a briefing with reporters, Qualcomm demonstrated some of the practical new abilities its new processor will enable in next year’s smartphones.

Here are five things next year's smartphones, powered by the 810, will be able to do that this year's can't:

1. Juggle 4K video

This display has 4K resolution, but the device is also capable of wirelessly streaming 4K video to a display.

IMAGE: MASHABLE, CHRISTINA ASCANI

Yes, smartphones such as the LG G3already have Quad HD (2,560 x 1,440) displays, which more pixels than you’ll ever need, but the new phones will be more about moving 4K video around than actually displaying it. A phone with a Snapdragon 810 will be able to wirelessly stream a 4K video (4,096 x 2,160) to a TV with just a few taps. Of course, you’ll need a TV or dongle capable of receiving it, but that’s in the works, too.

And just where will we get all the 4K video? Qualcomm believes that we’ll create it ourselves, and there’s good reason to think that. Most flagship smartphones can already shoot 4K video (it requires only an 8-megapixel camera), and the company estimates 500 million devices will be 4K-capable by 2018. An ecosystem needs to arise to deal with those big video files, and the 810 enables exactly that.

2. Simulate an optical zoom

The computational power of the Snapdragon 810 chip will let smartphone cameras like this one simulate the zoom power of a DSLR lens.

IMAGE: MASHABLE, CHRISTINA ASCANI

There’s a new kind of smartphone camera, made by Core Photonics, that’s actually two cameras: a normal wide-angle imager, and one with a fixed telephoto lens that magnifies the image about 3x. Using the serious computing power in the Qualcomm chip, the phone can combine the two images to create a picture that Core Photonics claims is better than what a DSLR can capture, at low zoom levels.

Checking out a live demo of the camera, I could read the text in a Peanuts cartoon that the camera was aimed at, even though the zoom was engaged at about 8x. The picture from a normal camera, displayed alongside the Photonics cam, was noticeably blurrier, and the text was illegible.

3. Record directional audio

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chip will enable directional audio recording while capturing video, letting the camera capture individual voices in a loud room.

IMAGE: MASHABLE, CHRISTINA ASCANI

One big issue with capturing video on cellphones is audio quality. With the new chip, the phone will be able to process sound in a way that captures it in specific directions. If you, say, just want to record audio from the person you’re filming, you’ll be able to tell your camera you just want his or her voice, and nothing else.

4. Serve as your home PC

This receiver enables a Snapdragon 810-powered tablet to become a home PC by connecting to a monitor, keyboard and mouse wirelessly.

With this much computing power in a phone or tablet, it can actually serve as a PC workstation, connecting wirelessly to a workstation with a monitor and keyboard. With a device not much bigger than a Chromecast, a Qualcomm-powered tablet can power a the workstation, connected via the next generation of Wi-Fi, called 802.11ad (akaWiGig).

The Snapdragon 810 will be the first Qualcomm chip to support 802.11ad, which is about 5x the speed of the current 802.11ac standard. That’s good enough for 4K and then some, although it’s going to require new hardware all around.

5. Game like a console

A Snapdragon 810-powered smartphone or tablet can do double duty as a game console, wirelessly streaming gameplay to a TV.

IMAGE: MASHABLE, CHRISTINA ASCANI

Finally, a phone or tablet powered by a Snapdragon 810 processor will be a pretty good substitute for a game console. While Android has had difficulty in becoming a fully fledged game platform, next year’s hardware will be superb for gaming, able to connect to an external monitor wirelessly with ease for gaming on a big screen.

All these new abilities are just demonstrations at this point — it’s up to manufacturers to implement them. But they certainly will, and tomorrow’s smartphones will surely play an even greater role in our digital lives than they do now… if that’s even possible.

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New smartphone battery recharges in less than two minutes

StoreDot's latest prototype charges smartphones in about two minute.

LAS VEGAS— Your next smartphonecould charge in less than two minutes.

Since first showing off the lab-based prototype of its ultra-fast battery charger, the company behind the device has moved much closer to making it a reality.

StoreDot, the nanotech startup behind the charger, has a new prototype that is smaller and doesn't add bulk to the actual smartphone. During Mashable'sdemo, the Galaxy S5 battery went from almost empty to 100% in less than two minutes.

It almost sounds too good to be true but StoreDot CEO Doron Myersdorf says it's because the company took a completely different approach when creating its battery. Rather than trying to improve the capacity of the battery itself, the company redesigned the internal structure of the battery so it can charge rapidly. The tradeoff for this speed is the overall battery life is shorter— the battery I saw will last about five hours.

But by cutting charging time down to a minute or two— Mysersdorf says the final product will have a recharge time of well under two minutes— recharging once or twice a day is a nonissue.

"This is not trivial, it took us a lot of research," Mysersdorf said. "This is a design that is trying to achieve something that was not the goal before. Nobody thought about giving you less energy ,everybody thought about giving you more energy."

There are some caveats. The battery is more expensive than typical batteries and Myersdorf anticipates the battery will add about $50 to the total cost of a phone. And though StoreDot has made prototypes that work with handsets currently on the market, smartphone manufacturers will have to make "some modifications" to their devices in order to accommodate the battery. This means it will be up to individual companies to take advantage of the technology.

But on that front, Myersdorf is optimistic. The company is already in early talks with "all the big guys"— the CEO said they have already had more than a dozen meetings with potential partners during CES— and the current goal is to have the batteries in the hands of consumers by 2017.

But the company's vision goes well beyond smartphones. Myersdorf sees a future where all battery-powered devices are use these types of batteries and see electric vehicles as the next big opportunity for the company.

StoreDot starting an an electric vehicles initiative with the goal of creating batteries for cars like Teslas that will recharge in lminutes rather than hours. Myersdorf said a prototype that will recharge a Tesla's battery in three minutes should be ready in about year.