First there is the telephone, which is something that sits on a table or desk. Then there is the mobile phone (cell phone), which is something you can carry around with you. They both allow you to make “calls”. So what is the “phone” part? It is a device that has connectivity to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) and, when it makes a connection to another device, enables you to talk to that device live. (Now the device might be another phone, or it might be the voice mail system, or an answering machine.) There are some other twiddly-bits to a phone, but that is the basic idea. VoIP systems can bypass the PSTN sometimes when they run on the internet only, but otherwise work pretty much like phones. (VoIP does create streams of packets, but does it in such a way as to create a virtual circuit and connect you live to your destination (in order to be just like a phone.))
We have historically delivered this functionality with specialized devices that are dedicated to this task. Even modern smart phones, which do a lot of other things like take pictures and run web applications, have a special part of the device that is still just a phone with historic phone behaviors (create a circuit to another device and allow a live call to take place.) We’ve added on more stuff, but left the phone function just as it has always been.
Of course, we know that what we really want is to talk to someone and have our speech delivered to that someone. Sometimes we’d like it to be live so we can talk together; and sometimes we don’t care about live. And now we have a device called a computer which, low and behold, can capture voice and deliver to others. It also has great advantages in that you can actually write applications which enable us to process the voice in other ways—not just live delivery which is all the phones do.
So why do we need phones? We don’t; or, more correctly, we won’t. We won’t need a specialized device. Basically, phones are an historic artifact from the days when we didn’t have computers. And they won’t go away immediately because they have an enormous infrastructure (think companies and network and hardware) that has yet to be re-purposed—that infrastructure can only manage a phone just the way it is currently conceived.
But it is all changing. The evolution is coming from both directions. Mobile phones are getting to be computers. And computers are getting to be so small and mobile that they are indistinguishable from phones. And networks are becoming more and more general purpose pipes to move our data and our voices.
So, without an enormous bout of innovation, what we think of as a phone is going to be obsolete. Not tomorrow, and not next year, but eventually. Eventually we will use computers of all sizes (like telephones and mobile phones today) and of varying degrees of mobility. They will come from what we think of now as phone manufacturers, but will also come from traditional and newly modeled computer manufacturers.
The really good news is that we’ll finally get some more sophisticated applications that will serve us better by saving wasted time, doing things when and how we want, and connecting us seamlessly to anyone in the world.
But it will no longer be a phone.
PS. You may think of your iPhone or your Blackberry as a general purpose device. But really they both embody two devices. One is the regular old phone system; and one is a multi-purpose computer. And so far, the power of the computer has not been unleashed for the “phone call” usage. Now you have a device that is a phone and a computer, but eventually you’ll be able to lose the “phone”.
