Many who responded with a further elaboration on this scenario said while the device we will be using will be small and possibly resemble today’s wireless phones in its shape, it will actually be a multitasking computer, used less for voice communication than for other tasks. “The computing power that will be able to fit into a phone-size device in 13 years will be incredible,” wrote an anonymous respondent.
“By 2020 a device that more closely resembles today's mobile phone rather than today's computer will certainly be the primary connection tool,” said Paul Miller, a technology evangelist for Talis, a UK-based Web company, and blogger for ZDNet. “Whether it is at all 'phone'-like, or even used very often for voice-only communication is more open to question, though.”
Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board member, agreed. “By 2020 we'll stop talking about ‘phones,’ with any luck,” she wrote. “Nor will we be talking about ‘telephony.’ Those terms, I hope, will be dead. These devices will just be handsets of which we'll be very fond. They'll have screens that are just large enough for us to feel immersed in the visuals provided. What will we be doing? Using the Internet. Interacting, doing work, talking, participating, uploading to the cloud. By 2020, the network providers of ‘telephony’ will have been (with any luck) disintermediated. We'll have standard network connections around the world, but they won't be optimized on billing (as telephone and wireless connections are now). Billions of people will have joined the Internet who don't speak English. They won't think of these things as ‘phones’ either—these devices will be simply lenses on the online world.”
Rich Miller, CEO for Replicate Technologies and an Internet pioneer with ARPANET, wrote, “The ‘phone’ as such is more likely to be a personal media server/media gateway. This same personal media server—size not much different than today's mobile phone—permits varieties of ‘terminal’ devices, including display, voice input/output, etc. Audio and video interfaces are more likely to be separate devices (like today's Bluetooth headset, but with more user interface controls).”
Steve Jones, co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate dean at the University of Illinois-Chicago, projected, “By 2020 I don't think it will be so easy to distinguish between a mobile phone and a laptop. These will blend into a general ‘mobile computing’ category of device (for which we probably don't yet have a name).”
Jim Kohlenberger, executive director of Voice on the Net Coalition, a senior fellow for the Benton Foundation and former White House policy advisor, commented, “The mobile ‘phone’ will largely be eclipsed and replaced by the open network device—an open mobile computing device also capable of voice. But the assumption is correct that these mobile devices will be more significant and ubiquitous than wired devices. In terms of inclusion, there are already developing countries that have set up open and competitive wireless markets to foster these innovations and reap their benefits. But other developing countries that still have government-run telecom sectors or that haven’t enabled wireless competition could be further left behind.”
And Jeff Jarvis, top blogger at Buzzmachine.com and professor at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, and many other respondents said we should not concentrate on the appliance, but the connectivity. “We will have many devices that are constantly connected; in that sense, it's connectivity that will be mobile and the devices will merely plug in,” Jarvis explained. “This will lead to a world that is not only connected but also live and immediate. Witnesses will share news as they witness it. We can get answers to any question anytime. We can stay in constant touch with the people we know, following their lives as we follow RSS and Twitter feeds.”