Hi-tech advances in smartphones are opening up a world of possibilities

It's your favourite gadget. You spend your entire commute interacting with it, and it's becoming increasingly essential for both your work and social life. You even sleep with it. But how much is the smartphone really changing? Despite the trend for ever bigger screens, the physical shape and core features of a smartphone have hardly changed in the past five years.

So have we reached a plateau in smartphone development? Not a bit of it. In a few years your smartphone will have quadrupled in speed and power, opening up a new world of possibilities, but it's not brands like Apple, Samsung and Lenovo that are the critical players. This revolution is all about the processor chip inside.

Existing single-core and dual-core phones will eventually become 48-core super-computers thanks to processor manufacturers such as Qualcomm, Nvidia and Intel. And with new power comes a change in how a smartphone both performs and is perceived.

Smartphone cameras long since killed-off compacts and camcorders, but there's about to be a huge jump in the quality they're capable of capturing. This is the swap from HD to Ultra HD or 4k (4,000 pixel resolution) quality, a revolution that's already under way in flat screen televisions despite there being no official source of 4k movies yet.

"You don't have to wait for 4k movies - you can just create your own high quality 4k video straight from your smartphone," says Bala Sripathirathan, senior staff manager of engineering at Qualcomm, whose Snapdragon 800 processor is the only 4k-capable processor out there. "We now have high bandwidth mediums like Wi-fi and 4G LTE to transfer 4k video onto the cloud, and once it's on there you can stream it to your TV."

Snapdragon 800 is already found in popular handsets from Samsung, Nokia, HTC and LG, but its capabilities are only just beginning to be exploited.