Article
At the 1964 World’s Fair in New York AT&T unveiled the Picturephone. In the future, they 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. They have changed beyond recognition since its invention in 1876. What mobile phones will look like in a year or two is easy to guess: they will be slimmer and let you watch television on the move. But what about ten or 15 years from now?