I currently use the LGA340 flip-phone. Lasted 3+ years and looks like it has another 3+ years in it; Compare that to smart/touch phones like my GF has which the battery keeps dying out and buttons stop working (she also drops her phone a lot more often than me).

Naturally the cell phone company wants to extend me a new contract with a 'new phone' and 2 year contract... Funny especially since i converted to the go-phone plan and have yet to use $20 on it in the last 3 months.

$800 - $1200 for a phone is sad.

larger and larger screens at the expense of battery life is sad.

thermal sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, in your phone, is kind of sad, really.

you're not Batman people you don't need the Batphone.

I once saw a captioned picture on reddit of a guy who had dropped his keys outside his car door. Remember when you could do shit like that and not have it immortalized?

Samsung and Apple have cool guy phones for cool guys who encourage stupid prices. It's pretty sad.

I don't care where phones go as long as they go someplace other than $1500+ and with a million different kinds of sensors combined with "This app needs access to..."

Smartphones will get a little larger, so aging baby boomers with poor eyesight can see them better.

Beyond that, just minor changes around the margins.

they all look the same, its like everyone wearing the same shirt

Mine went for an involuntary swim in the harbour.

What's a "smartphone"?

It`s a phone that is more intelligent than it`s user!

Well, Smartphone is the term used for handys with touchscreen wich are more computers than phones.

"Handy" is a German term, even though the word itself is probably English. No non-German speakers refer to a cell phone as a handy.

Can't be that hard, a decades old calculator is usually more intelligent than its user.

A tablet then.
My cell phone would need a much larger screen for this and then I couldn't carry it around in any pocket anymore, the battery would probably have to get charged more often than every two weeks and I wouldn't be allowed to drop it all the time. Makes no sense.

One direction for Smartphones to go is to become all-round productivity and entertainment devices. Your phone would hook to a monitor/keyboard to write and to the TV and controller to play games. That would provide avenues of growth for CPU/GPU power.
Yes, they are small tablets with the (rarely used) ability to make phone calls.

By the way: If you want to have a pocket sized computer with keyboard, gaming controls, two SD slots, long battery life, proper Debian etc... that can also be used as a phone, check out the Dragonbox Pyra.

Ah yeah, forgot about that, sorry. In USA it`s Cell(ular) phone, in GB it`s mobile phone.

e-Ink technology isn't anywhere near where I want it to be, and likely won't ever get there. Dammit! I want a 9 to 10 inch e-Ink device with good colours, in a half-decent price range --ie. a device for reading comic books-- not just a choice of these 6-inch 16-shades-of-gray devices which are perfect for plain text or devices with washed-out colours and exorbitant prices intended for the education market. I don't care much about refresh speed --the pages are static anyway -- nor resolution --166 dpi as is common on ebook readers is just fine-- but colour reproduction and display size on a screen that doesn't require being backlit and getting updated constantly to not lose the image is something I would very dearly like to see.

I think the direction Microsoft is going with this is pretty interesting (Continuum). The Lumia 950 (or 950XL) can be hooked up to a dock that connects to keyboard, mouse, and the monitor, and you can use it as a cutdown Windows 10 PC. It doesn't support all apps at the moment, and will probably get less cutdown over time, but I think it's a good start.

I want that phone in the Total Recall remake where putting it against any window or glass would make that window a screen (monitor). that seemed handy.

But not a phone integrated into my hand, yikes!