It’s long since surpassed the credit card as the one thing you wouldn’t leave home without, but if industry predictions are correct, the humble mobile handset will soon play an even more important role in our lives.

Think about what you use your handset for already. Mine is my contact book, my diary, my calculator, my email inbox, my FM radio, my store of podcasts and my mobile web browser.

But within the next 24 months, there are a host of other mobile features set to become daily tools. If only even half of them actually eventuate, handset will morph into something even more powerful.

According to the crystal ball gazers at Gartner there are at least 10 mobile applications that will become mainstream by 2012.

Some of them are not surprising. They include things like mobile browsing, search, instant messaging and music. These things already exist on phones, but work is needed to make the interfaces much easier to use.

Gartner also identifies mobile money transfers and payments as an emerging area. This makes sense as it combines the enhanced security offered by mobiles with the convenience of not having to carry money. It will take effort to convince retailers and banks of the worth of working together, but the benefits to customers will be significant.

Another on the list is location-based services. Here a lot of the pieces are already in place – it’s just a matter of getting them to work together more easily. Growing numbers of handsets have GPS and maps. Linking this with attractive retail offerings (discount coupons when you walk past the shop for example) could have a dramatic effect on commerce.

A final one is mobile health monitoring. Here again, things are in an infancy, but as more applications are devised that can run on mobile devices, the more pervasive such monitor could become.

It all adds up to a future where making voice calls on your mobile will seem almost incidental.