Before you wake up in the morning, your iPhone downloads your news and tells your coffeemaker to start brewing. Then when you’re up and you wave the device at your TV, the news feeds get transferred to your TV.
That’s how AT&T’s iPhone chief Ralph de la Vega envisions the popular Apple device in the future, according to a public discussion Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
Lock Your Door, Start Your Car
After you drink your coffee and read your news on the TV, de la Vega envisions you’ll use your iPhone to lock your house door, start your car, and, as you drive, the device’s text-to-speech function reads you the news you haven’t yet read.
At the office, the ubiquitous device coordinates a conference call and, since the call is with non-English speakers, it translates your English into their spoken language and vice versa, acting as the voice for both sides.
De la Vega also said AT&T Labs is working to integrate the iPhone with its Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service, U-Verse. One function would be to use the smartphone as a remote control for the programming service and for its digital video recorder, with the resulting TV programming playing either on the TV or on the iPhone.
Al Hilwa, a program director at industry research firm IDC, noted that such all-in-one automated uses have also been projected in past years for computers. “But most people find this kind of extreme automation to be more trouble than it’s worth,” he said.
He noted that a PC is much more capable than an iPhone, and “we don’t use a PC to start a car.” The key to what the future iPhone will do, he said, is solving problems where mobility has been a problem or is an asset. “The litmus test is mobility,”…