The phone of the future

The phone has had a splendid 130-year history. What will it look like in future? Will it even be called a phone? 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.

The phone of the future
The phone has had a splendid 130-year history. What will it look like in future? Will it even be called a phone? 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.
http://economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=8312260

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