You wake up refreshed. Ever since you got that alarm clock that adapts to your sleep cycle, your calendar, and the traffic report, you practically leap out of bed. You exercise, focusing on the muscles that the biometric sensor in your shirt says need some help. Not 10 seconds after you finish, the oven beeps—breakfast is ready. Healthy stuff. You need it, after all the drinking last weekend. As you eat, the TV streams headlines tailored to your interests. Suddenly, your smartwatch buzzes with an alert: Pileup on the freeway. You need to leave, like now, or you're going to be late to work. You have that presentation today. You can't be late.

Most people in tech agree that life probably will look something like this in 2027. Omnipresent technology will touch nearly every moment of your day, invisibly making life faster, more efficient, more attuned to your wants and needs and feelings. This raises an interesting question: In a gloriously connected, flawlessly optimized world where everything is a computer, what do you need with a smartphone?

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, which hit store shelves on June 29, 2007. (It might be more accurate to say they grazed store shelves before landing in the hands of buyers, who spent days camped outside Apple Stores.) Now, any number of statistics speak to the seismic shift the iPhone caused. Four billion people own a smartphone. The devices generate hundreds of billions in revenue each year. They gave rise to entire industries, like smart homes and drones. Hell—you're probably reading this on your phone.

It won't last. Nothing does. The phone in your pocket could give way to a watch on your wrist, glasses on your face, or headphones in your ears. When Siri and Google Assistant finally reach their potential, everything will respond to voice commands. Actually, skip that. Go straight to brain interfaces. You think; it happens. At that point, all you need is a killer pair of Wayfarer-style augmented-reality glasses. If an app in your AR glasses can put a virtual TV on your wall, why bother with a real TV? Seems like a lot of unnecessary hammering.

And yet, nearly everyone in the industry believes that pane of glass in your pocket is here to stay, at least for a while. Something about that in-between, do-everything device just feels so ... right. "While there will be experimentation with rolling, folding, and perhaps holographic displays, the basic slab form factor will remain the default," says Avi Greengart, research director for Global Data. "It offers the best tradeoff between information density, interaction, and portability."

By 2027, your smartphone will be no thicker than a pane of glass, with no bezel, buttons, or breaking. You'll charge it wirelessly, and measure battery life in weeks, not days. The camera will blow your mind, as will the processor. A 5G network, more reliable than anything you're used to now, will make everything orders of magnitude faster. This reads like every phone nerd's wish list. But it's all under development. Corning can already embed circuitry into Gorilla Glass that is both flexible and nearly indestructible. Qualcomm's spinning up 5G, and says you'll see it everywhere in the next decade. Everything you've ever wanted is coming.

Rather than usurp other gadgets, the smartphone of 2027 will augment them. "It's your personal internet bubble," says Andy Rubin, who founded Android and now leads Essential. "The smartphone brings connectivity within 1 foot of you, 24 hours a day seven days a week." Think of it as a collection of features available to every other gadget: a wireless router, a secure authenticator, a camera, a microphone, a set of data and preferences.