The Economist. The phone of the future

A wonderful article from The Economist on the not-so-near-future of cell phones. via pasta and vinegar.

''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?

A selection of some of the more entertaining predictions:

-- The chances are that phones will not only look very differentthey may not even be seen. They may be hidden in jewellery or accessories, or even embedded in the body. They will undoubtedly have a host of additional features and novel uses, and users will probably interact with them in new ways, too.

-- According to Bruce Sterling, a science-fiction writer, phones will be remote controls'' of our lives'', remotely conrolloing house keys, Game Boys, flashlights, maps, compasses, flash drives, health monitors, microphones, recorders, laser pointers, passports, make-up kits, burglar alarms, handguns, handcuffs and slave bracelets.

-- In a decade's time a typical phone will have enough storage capacity to be able to video its user's entire life.

-- Tiny projectors inside handsets could allow walls, tabletops or screens made of flexible materials to be used as displays while on the move, suggests Jeff Wacker, a futurist at EDS, a technology-services firm.

It is one thing to speculate about the technical possibilities of future phones, but quite another to imagine the social consequences. In the 1980s nobody foresaw that mobile phones would become anything more than executive playthings; and the runaway success of text-messaging took the entire industry by surprise.

No doubt much of this speculation about the future of the phone will prove to be as misguided as ATT's vision of the Picturephone back in 1964''.
12/2/2006 8:09:48 PM
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