‘Smartphones aren’t going away…but the user experience will no longer revolve around a device’: Qualcomm exec

Katouzian elaborated: “Every device will need the ability to carry your assistant wherever you go. So, if I have a wearable AI solution, it has to assist me on the wearable. If I have a higher-computing device, it has to assist me wherever I am. Once you think about it that way, the phone becomes just another device – it’s no longer the central one.”

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 chip, hint at a future where wearables play a central role in how we interact with AI. (Image: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

Industry insiders have long predicted that smartphones may not remain at the centre of the ecosystem in the future, but questions still linger about which device might replace them and how quickly. So far, there has been no clear answer, even Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, perhaps the most popular on the market, still require pairing with a smartphone to function. They aren’t independent, and much of the processing happens on the phone.

“Smartphones are not going to go away, and some reliance on them is a must for the next few years. But if a smartphone transitions to another wearable with more computing power, or even to a puck you can carry with you, then you can start to see how that shift might happen. The wrist is a place where you can place a modem; the pocket is another,” Katouzian explained.

“So, you have connectivity back to the cloud, along with the ability to actually execute AI on the device. With enough memory and computing capability, you can offload tasks. For example, today, you have your phone in your pocket, you tell your glasses to record a video, and that video doesn’t go to the cloud- it goes to your phone. The phone then processes it for you. That’s exactly the experience you want, whether it’s handled by a phone or a puck. That’s the shift I think people should start to imagine,” he added.

Qualcomm, the world’s largest maker of smartphone chips, also designs processors for smart glasses. Its Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chip powers Meta’s new lineup of smart glasses, including the Ray-Ban Display, a $799 pair that enables features like reading messages, previewing photos, viewing live captions, and even attending a WhatsApp call. The high-tech glasses, which go on sale in the US on September 30, use an accompanying neural wristband to interact with the device.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks about the evolving role of smart glasses. (Image: Anuj Bhatia/The Indian Express)

Katouzian sees a similar path for the Snapdragon AR1 chip as with the smartphone chip platform, meaning smart glasses will come in multiple variations and will likely be found in models from different brands. “From AR1, you can expect us to scale up and scale down, so we can offer different price ranges of glasses. For us, AR1 has been a great vehicle to ignite this market,” he said.

“The journey will be similar to how the smartphone evolved. But it’s different because you can think of it as wearable AI. You are wearing glasses, and who would have thought that AI could bring them to life and actually help you? And your phone becomes even better as a result. I think these types of innovations around multi-device ecosystems and the use of agentic AI and multi-modal AI to assist you are the way forward.”

Katouzian isn’t the only high-profle tech executive who thinks smartphones won’t be replaced by smart glasses anytime soon. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent podcast that he didn’t think “people are getting rid of phones anytime soon.” “It’s not like we are going to throw away our phones, but I think what’s going to happen is that, slowly, we are just going to start doing more things with our glasses and leaving our phones in our pockets more,” Zuckerberg said.