Communication - where's it going ?

I was thinking about the direction of communication last night, and sure enough an article on News.com turns up this morning which talks about video communication. So where is communication headed? – think about the changes from radio to black and white television, to color, to PVR, to portable video players – what’s changed in communication? – first there was the telephone, a fixed line device that needed you to be at your home or office to make or answer calls, next came the portable phone, or cellphone – that’s about as far as we’ve come, it’s still about voice communication, the fixed line is going away with cellphones and VoIP phones replacing the regular “land line” phones. But what about video? – Instant Messaging applications provide text, emoticons, and video over IP but the technology is just too hard for the average user to use, I certainly can’t see my mother using a video over IP application, so what about devices like the Beamer – I think this is perhaps too expensive – perhaps a mixture of video over IM and Beamer technologies would be the ideal mix, so the computer users can keep their PC’s and the relatives can use a ‘consumer device’. So what about cellphones, these are still primarily a voice device, yes the newer phones have cameras, media players, games etc… but the main use is as a voice phone – I wonder how long it’s going to be before we start to see video communication services on cellphones.

– Mike