AT&T provided their very own sci-fi fan-fiction of what's to come of the iPhone in the future at the Web 2.0 Summit. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington asked AT&T iPhone chief Ralph De la Vega what the future of the iPhone is, De la Vega excitedly began listing a number of applications and usage scenarios for the iPhone. De la Vega claims that there is a lot of testing going on at the AT&T labs to integrate the iPhone into AT&T's fiber optic-based IPTV service, U-Verse. This service would pretty much turn your iPhone into a TiVo.
With integration of the iPhone as a remote for displaying content on your TV, or vice versa, De la Vega thinks the possibility for full life integration could be endless.
"Before the iPhone wakes you up in the morning with its alarm clock," De la Vega says, "it will have already loaded all of your daily news feeds onto the phone. It will also have already sent a wireless message to your coffee maker to get the coffee ready. While you're sitting there drinking your coffee, he says, you might decide that you'd rather read your news on the TV screen; so with a wave of the device toward the TV, de la Vega says, you'll send your news feeds wirelessly from the phone to the TV for reading.
Now you leave the house, and use your iPhone to lock the door on the way out. You get in the car. The iPhone starts your car. On the way to work, the iPhone continues reading your news to you using its text-to-speech function.
Later on, at your office, the iPhone initiates a conference call between you and two potential customers in Japan. On the call, when you speak English, the iPhone translates it to Japanese so that your potential customers can understand you. When they answer in Japanese, the iPhone converts their speech into English so you can understand them."
As mentioned, it sounds like a lot of fan-fiction. Arrington then asked De la Vega if there were plans to launching an Android phone, like the G1, with no response. Then De la Vega was asked what AT&T plans on doing once their exclusive iPhone agreements ends in 2010. Again no real answer.
If AT&T's hope for full life integration comes through with the iPhone, it's safe to say that the fall of man to technology won't resemble that bleak and torn depiction the Matrix movies have provided us. Instead, it will most definitely include coffee and iPhone overlords.
