You are viewing video on your mobile. But the screen is too small to really see anything other than the close-ups. So, holding your handset, you flick your wrist towards your television.

Instantaneously you are watching those same pictures in all their 50” ultra high definition glory.

Seconds later, your handset alerts you to the arrival of a new email. One glance tells you that you not only need read it immediately, but there are several large attachments you also have to study.

Stopping only to pause your television to resume watching later you again flick your wrist, this time in the direction of your PC.

Immediately that same email appears opened on your monitor, together with the accompanying attachments.

As you start to read you realise that you won’t be returning to the television any time soon. Caffeine is clearly necessary. Fortunately all it takes is a few finger taps on your touchscreen for your mobile to switch on the coffee maker. Minutes later your phone informs you your beverage awaits.

Thanks to its ultra-high capacity short-range Wi-Fi connection and its embedded accelerometers your phone can sling content to and from other electronic devices nearby.

Your handset is now the central hub of your connected life.

It wakes you in the morning. Makes your coffee. Downloads your newspaper. Then, when you leave the house, location and presence sensors lock the front door behind you, turn off the lights, set the alarm, open the garage and start the car. As you drive off you link in to the car radio and navigation systems and automatically establish a connection to the office network.

This is the future, as articulated by Ralph de la Vega, president and chief executive officer of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, in a recent interview with Telephony.

In it he envisages a scenario where interconnectivity is ubiquitous. Some of the links he describes will soon be with us, such as those between phone and television. Others will take a little longer, in a few instances perhaps as many as 15 to 20 years.

As Vega sees it “Wireless, and in particular mobile broadband, is going to change the way the world lives and works.”

By being able to access high quality broadband anywhere usage will increase and previously un-envisaged applications will evolve.

Inevitably this will place demands on network capacity. Vega’s colleague Hank Kafka has previously commented on the cost of moving data over 4G networks. Others now see spectrum reuse as one way to resolve bandwidth constraints.

Not only will the cells that comprise the mobile network become smaller but your handset will make use of any spare processing capability offered by other devices nearby, similarly assisting other handsets whenever it can.

Your mobile phone long since ceased being a way to simply make voice calls or send and receive short text messages. With every new iteration it can do more. Already it has begun to make other technologies obsolete. Land line telelephones, stand alone cameras and camcorders, computers – all are threatened.

Soon, with no more than a flick of the wrist, many will be discarded. The question of course is which?