Ever imagined your smartphone predicting your next move, next purchase or interpret actions based on what it knows? If not, be prepared to face this reality in another four years.

According to research firm Gartner, by 2017 mobile phones will be smarter than people not because of an intrinsic intelligence, but because the cloud and the data stored in the cloud will provide them with the computational ability to make sense of the information they have so they appear smart.
 
“Phones will become our secret digital agent, but only if we are willing to provide the information they require,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. Regulatory and privacy issues, as well as the level of comfort users will have in sharing this information, will differ considerably across age groups as well as geographies.

“Smartphones are becoming smarter, and will be smarter than you by 2017,” said Milanesi. “If there is heavy traffic, it will wake you up early for a meeting with your boss, or simply send an apology if it is a meeting with your colleague. The smartphone will gather contextual information from its calendar, its sensors, the user’s location and personal data.”

“Mobile phones have turned into smartphones thanks to two things: technology and apps,” said  Milanesi. “Technology has added features such as cameras, locations and sensors, while apps have connected those to an array of functions that, for the most part, add and improve our day to day life from a social, knowledge, entertainment and productivity point of view.”
 
The study says that what smartphones can do through apps has improved and broadened thanks to the personal cloud. “We assume that apps will acquire knowledge over time and get better with improved predictions of what users need and want, with data collection and response happening in real-time,” said Ms. Milanesi.
 
The first services that will be performed "automatically" will generally help with menial tasks, and significantly time consuming or time wasting tasks, such as time-bound events (calendaring) such as booking a car for its yearly service, creating a weekly to-do list, sending birthday greetings, or responding to mundane email messages. Gradually, as confidence in the outsourcing of more menial tasks to the smartphone increases, consumers are expected to become accustomed to allowing a greater array of apps and services to take control of other aspects of their lives - this will be the era of cognizant computing.