While some electronic toys and gadgets come with some dumbing down effects on their users, most of these devices offer increasing levels of convenience.

Take the mobile phone, for example. While too many accidents and mishaps might have been caused by improper (read: stupid) ways of using the cellular phone, it cannot be denied that these wireless contraptions have made it easier by far to keep in touch with other people.

Yet, while today’s smartphones might seem like a giant step toward the mobile equivalent of Nirvana, the possibilities for more ease and comfort seem endless. We might have only scratched the surface.

Boarding Pass Mobiles

In the United States, for one, airline passengers will soon be able to use their mobile phones as boarding passes. The International Air Transport Association recently announced that it intends to develop a technology to make this possible.

Texas-based USAA, a banking and insurance company, for its part, allows its customers to deposit checks using their camera-equipped mobile phones. All that bank customers have to do is take photos of both sides of the check using their camera phones, and send those images via MMS to the bank’s electronic deposit system.

Eco-Friendly Phone

American wireless company Sprint has partnered with Samsung to offer subscribers the chance to own a mobile phone with a much-reduced environmental impact. The Samsung Reclaim cell phone comes with a casing made from biodegradable plastic.

While the other environment-friendly mobile phones that came before it had barebones features, the Reclaim includes a slide-out keyboard, and comes with an email, Web access, camera, and GPS navigation. This means that consumers who want to show their concern for the environment need not be saddled with mediocre phones.

LG Chocolate

LG Mobile recently unveiled its new LG Chocolate mobile phone, the fourth model in the company’s Black Label Series. What is most striking about this phone is its 4-inch LCD screen. Aside from providing users with 21:9 aspect ratio for a “panoramic, cinema-like quality,” the big screen will surely make mobile computing and telephony an exciting experience.

As we get closer to it, the future keeps getting harder to predict. Woe to the IT writers who pretend otherwise and boldly and stupidly broadcast their predictions.

Almost a couple of decades ago, almost no one foresaw that the Nokia 3210 and 5110 handsets we were using would morph into the N-Series multimedia phones. Nobody imagined that Apple would someday become king of the smartphones, and that Google would be so into cell phones.

I’ve got this feeling, there are more mobile surprises in store for us.