CRI听力: A Look Back at the Best Inventions of the Decade - Happy 2010!

A new decade is upon us, and we are marking the date in our Blackberry, iPod, or Google Phone. These gadgets hardly seem strange anymore, but think back ten years and try to remember using a paper date book to realize how far we have come in the realm of technology.

CRI Reporter Andrea Hunt has the story.



Simple technology we use today would have been perceived in 2000 as something out of the futuristic Jetsons or Inspector Gadget cartoons.

Consider the subway - it is now completely normal for people to send emails or international SMSs from their phones or for grown men to play video games on hand held PSPs on their way to work.

Let's see what innovations have been most life-changing in the last ten years.(www.hXen.com)

Here's an obvious one - email! Back in 2000, having your own Hotmail or Yahoo email address meant you were ahead of the game. These days, people have 2 or even 3 email addresses as well as multiple chat accounts.

Next up is the ever-popular iPod, the MP3 player that literally creates a constant, portable soundtrack to your life and is widely characterized as the absolute best invention people never knew they needed.

Luis Mangas from Texas recalls days in the past of lugging around bulky cassette tapes and is grateful for the change.

"The best thing about having an MP3 player is that I can have all of my music inside of a small device and I can get thousands of songs."

By far, people consider mobile phone evolution to have had the biggest impact on their everyday lives.

Marcela Morales from Colombia remembers her first cell phone, joking that it was so big she couldn't do anything with it, let alone dial or text anyone.

She explains why the iPhone was a step forward for her.

"It was the best thing I have gotten in my life because now I can do everything from my phone. From a phone call to browsing the web or writing an email, I can make phone calls through Skype, chat on MSN, and I have my camera there, I have my iPod there and everything."

The question remains, what does the future hold? At the rate we are going, we will be having normal phone calls using tiny chips in our ears.

Luis Mangas ventures a guess.

"Teletransportion - they will find a way to transport yourself for communication because if right now if we can get a phone call or a video call just using internet, I'm sure that maybe in twenty years, we can move from one city to another one."

Sound impossible? If you had told someone in 1950 that we would be able to send a letter electronically, they would have said you were crazy.

Remember that as you send an international SMS or use Skype for a video call to say, Happy New Year 2010!

For CRI, I'm Andrea Hunt.