The Phone of the Future

From the Economist: The phone of the future

AT THE 1964 World's Fair in New York AT&T unveiled the Picturephone. In the future, the world's biggest telecoms firm pronounced, people would communicate via round, black-and-white screens that plugged into the wall. That prediction, like so many others about the future of communications, was wrong. The majority of today's phones are mobile handsets, not fixed-line ones, and although the technology for video-calling is widely deployed, hardly anyone uses it.

And yet speculation about the future of phones persists, and no wonder. The telephone has changed beyond recognition since its invention in 1876, and is now both the most personal, most social and most rapidly evolving technological device. So to imagine the phone of the future is also to imagine the future of consumer technology, and its personal and social impact. What mobile phones will look like in a year or two is easy to guess: they will be slimmer and probably will let you watch television on the move. But what about ten or 15 years from now?

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Researchers at Nokia, meanwhile, speculate that within a decade, the cost of storage will have fallen so far that it might be possible to store every piece of music ever recorded in a single chip that could be included in each phone. It would be necessary to update the chip every so often to allow for new releases, of course. But this could open up new business models that do not depend on downloading music over the airwaves; instead, the phone could simply exchange brief messages with a central server to unlock purchased tracks or report back on what the user had listened to for billing purposes.

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As for input devices, technology exists to beam a “virtual keyboard” onto a flat surface; a separate sensor then tracks finger movements to determine which “keys” have been pressed. But entering data into a phone might ultimately be done not with fingers but with speech—or even directly by the brain. The keypad is a vestige of the rotary dial, which itself is an artefact of the switch from human operators to direct-dialling in the 1920s. Today, numbers are on the wane thanks to the ease with which mobiles can store and retrieve names and the ubiquity of e-mail addresses and other internet-based identity tags, such as Skype names. Phone numbers may become as invisible to users as the underlying internet-protocol addresses of websites are to people surfing the web.

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Phones could also change how people interact with things, as well as other people. In 15 years' time, when everything from shoes to shirts to sunglasses could well contain tiny wireless chips, people may use their phones to communicate with objects as well as talking to people, suggests Mr Lindoff. You could then use a search engine not just to find information on the internet, but to find objects in your home. “I want to search my home via Google—I want to find my green shirt,” says Mr Lindoff.

No doubt much of this speculation about the future of the phone will prove to be as misguided as AT&T's vision of the Picturephone back in 1964. Indeed, it may be that the whole idea of a telephone comes to be seen as an anachronism, as personal digital devices take on a bewildering range of new functions. Already, researchers at Motorola like to talk about “the device formerly known as the cellphone”. What it will be called in future, and what it will do, remain fascinating questions.