(From Tech Republic) – I love following smartphones. From the incredible hardware to the innovative operating systems and the strange and tumultuous companies that create and market them, it is an industry that always seems to be in flux. Where desktop hardware and software have more or less reached a peaceful détente between the major players, the smartphone industry looks like a map of post-WWII Europe, with borders, influences, and alliances changing almost weekly. Many in the corporate space have a love/hate relationship with these devices. With a rapidly shifting industry with no totally dominant player to new employee expectations about what they should be able to do with “their” phone, smartphones are just as much a source of potential headaches as they are productivity tools.

With that in mind, here are four wild predictions about what could happen in the smartphone industry in the next eighteen months. These are purely hypothetical but plausible scenarios based on my observations, rather than any insider information or sources within these companies. Disclaimer out of the way, here we go: (…)

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