Future smartphones may fold up, have 9 cameras and charge over thin air

Magic Leap has #promised to ship a developer-focused version of its Magic Leap One at some point this year.

Your next smartphone might just throw you a curve. Picture this: You pull your phone out of your pocket and unfold it like a napkin into a tablet. You press your finger on the screen, and it unlocks. You switch to the camera app, and a spider-like array of lenses shoots simultaneously to capture one giant photo. The shake-up couldn’t come soon enough.

Fingerprint scanners go inside

Recent breakthroughs let phone makers embed the fingerprint reader inside the screen. Just press your finger over the right area of the screen and the phone unlocks. Component maker Synaptics figured out how to take a picture of fingers by looking in between the phone’s pixels; Qualcomm created an ultrasonic sensor capable of scanning not only though screens but also metal. So far, the tech has made its way into phones from Chinese makers Vivo and Xiaomi

Chargeing

A prototype Wi-Charge adapter lets this phone juice up without any plugs                                                   Cameras sprout more lenses

The big idea: Phone snaps could soon compete in quality with big-honking-lens cameras. How? By covering the back of the phone with a bunch of small lenses that shoot simultaneously and then stitch it into one big photo.

We have already seen a version of this in Apple and Samsung phones with two lenses on the back. The second helps with zoom shots and measuring depth to create photos with artistically blurry backgrounds. The P21 Pro flagship from Huawei is the first to include three lenses: one color, one monochrome (to help with depth and lowlight situations) and one 3x zoom.

Screens fold up

The big idea: We once had flip phones. Now here come the flip tablets. At a display industry conference in May, the buzz was about prototypes of screens that were flexible enough to roll and flap in the wind. One firm, called BOE, showed a gadget it dubbed a “phoneblet” with a 7.5-inch screen that folded, without seams, into a phone and back again ... without breaking.