The pace of innovation and change in mobile devices is so dizzying it is difficult to predict the winning platforms and products of the next few years.

With that caveat, a panel of technology executives and experts nevertheless took out their crystal balls last Wednesday at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in this Colorado resort to take a glimpse into the mobile future.

Before an audience of movers and shakers from Silicon Valley and elsewhere, they looked at trends among smartphones and the fast-growing market for tablet computers pioneered by Apple’s iPad.

“I’d say that whatever we can imagine in this room right now will be possible in five years,” said George Colony, founder and chief executive of technology and market research company Forrester.

“Everyone will have smartphones within four years, all over the world, it’ll be so cheap,” Colony said. “By 2014 we believe that one-third of Americans will own a tablet.”

Frank Meehan, founder of handset maker INQ Mobile, repeatedly brought up the futuristic Steven Spielberg film Minority Report to describe the possibilities on the horizon for mobile devices.

Colony traced the evolution of the user interface for mobile devices to the current touchscreen technology popularised by the iPhone and iPad and pondered what might come next.

“Microsoft could take the Kinect technology and that could be the next big change,” he said of the motion-sensing XBox 360 game controller from the US software giant.

“If you look back at over 30 years of tech, all of the big changes have come through changes in user interface,” Colony said.

“Always look to user interface if you want to understand where the thunderstorm will be”.