AT&T Mobile chief Ralph de la Vega has some pretty ambitious plans for the iPhone. At the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday of last week he spoke of a bold future where the iPhone would basically handle every aspect of your day.
In the morning the device will download your daily news feeds, then send an alert to your coffee maker to begin brewing coffee. When you wake up you’ll simply point your iPhone toward your television and the day’s news will play on the big screen.
It will lock your doors on the way out in the morning, and crank your car. It will then read you the remaining bits of news with built-in speech capabilities while you drive to work.
After you get there it will orchestrate a conference call with two potential clients who speak Japanese. Even though you only speak English you won’t have a problem communicating, however, because the iPhone will translate the languages in real time, allowing both of you to communicate easily.
That’s all fascinating, and it would be amazing if it happens…but before we get to all of that…don’t you think maybe someone should figure out cut and paste?
3 thoughts on “AT&T Exec expects iPhone to do…well…everything…in the future”
50 years ago people imagined we’d be sitting in flying cars by the year 2000, and now they do the same kind of wild imagination, only now it’s for marketing purposes. i will never let an electronic device lock my house or start my car. and about the translation bit – neither machine translation nor speech recognition work in a remotely satisfying way as of right now. it’s gonna be a loooong way before we get the two working together in a manner like that.
Yeah, I think this is a bit ambitious. If there was AT&T coverage in South Dakota, I’d have one, but I wouldn’t expect it to do anything like this in the near future. Nice ‘zing’ at the end!
I agree with Phil’s point, but there’s no denying that technological progress has been accelerating over the past fifteen years. Shiiet, 10 years ago my computer had 7GB of harddrive space, now my phone can compute faster than my old PC and has over twice as much storage space.
Plus, a flying car requires innovation on the hardware side of things, all the things Michael described could and would be done throught software. Much easier to implement than boosters on the back of a station wagon.