What will the smartphones of 2040 be like? Here's our wild guess

 
Notches can only be seen in the Museum of Mobile Technology, every camera, sensor or speaker is either under the display or part of it. Making a video call? You can look the other person straight in the eyes, because the camera is somewhere behind them.

But wait, how would you open such device? Unless you want to use a diamond saw on it, you won't. You send it back to the manufacturer and they use special equipment to melt away the shell, so the internals can be recycled. Repairing, in 2040? Ha-ha, good one!

Cameras

It won't be too much to say that by that time the camera on your phone will be better than your own eyes. Ultra-slow-motion recording at 16K? Check! 20x optical zoom? Check. Infrared video and photo capabilities? Check. Thermal camera too? Yep! Ultrasound camera so we can pretend we're bats? Um... No.

Security features

The phone from 2040 will not only recognize your face, voice and fingerprints (every surface of the phone will be able to detect them, obviously), it will know it's you just by the way you're holding it. Unless you want someone else to use your phone, no one would be able to. For additional privacy, the phone will track your eyes and pixels in the main display will adjust the viewing angle so only you can see what's on it. Sound will also be beamed to you exclusively, in case you don't have the ear implants installed.

Speaking of eye-tracking, it will also allow you to use your phone without your thumbs getting in the way. Scrolling up and down while reading or typing when your hands are occupied, it will be precise enough to offer full handsfree functionality.

Battery

We're not going to try and guess which materials the batteries of the future will be made of, but if we don't get at least five days of battery life by then, we're living in the wrong timeline.

Improvements might also come from co-generation technologies that recharge the battery through the phone's motion, or sunlight, or heat from the chips, although by then there shouldn't be much of it. Speaking of chips... 

Yes, you are correct, the phone of 2040 would be able to run Crysis! And thanks to its AI capabilities, it will also bring world peace. Just kidding, we'll always find something to fight about. The AI would be strong by then, however, it will be able to recognize pretty much everything you point the camera at (including people) and give you information about it. The integrated assistant will not only make calls for you, but it will give you financial advice based on your spending, interests and income.

We're going one step further: the phone will be able to detect anomalies in your health by combining information from its sensors (cameras, microphones etc.) and analyzing the sweat from your fingers. Maybe it won't be able to diagnose you, but it will know you well enough to tell you when to see a doctor.

The processor will be able to handle pretty much everything you throw at it, and if you have some extra heavy workloads (or games), they will be handled by cloud computing servers via the ultra-fast 6G connection. This will make owning a desktop computer pointless.

"But I want my mouse, keyboard and 40" monitor!" Have no fear, those and other peripherals will connect to your phone without even having to take it out from your pocket. Apart from a desktop experience similar to what Samsung already has, the 2040 phone will allow you to have multiple operating systems (probably not if it's made by Apple), so you can install one of your choice.

Storage and Memory

That's always been a boring aspect of smartphones, so let's go with 10TB of storage and 32GB of DDR7 RAM, to get it out of the way.

Extra features

Besides the highly advanced versions of what you have in your smartphone today, we imagine other functions, which are done by standalone devices today, will find their way into smartphones in the future. For example:

Toxic gases detector