十年来改变我们生活的科技

We use them every day, and we're so used to mobile phones that it's hard to imagine life without them. But do you remember what our mobiles looked like at the beginning of the decade?

Rick Osterloh, Motorola's VP of software development, dug out a flip phone from the turn of the century. He says,

"You can see here it's a flip phone, which we're famous for. And it's got an external antenna and a numeric keypad. It was totally optimized around making phone calls and being durable and rugged. This phone is something that was quite typical of phones in this era."

Ten years later, phones like the iPhone have become multi-tasking devices that enable us to take photos, listen to music and search the internet. The phones became smarter and smarter, to the point where today phones are very much like a handheld computer.

A revolution that has marked the past decade is online phone calls. Launched in 2003, Skype is a software application that allows users to make telephone calls over the internet. Pete Friess, the president of the Tech Museum in San Jose, says making phone calls is no longer costly.

"We're using Skype and we're talking around the world for free. I'm living in the United States. I'm a European and there are days I communicate more with people of my hometown for no cost than I'm talking to people here."

And online communication doesn't stop there. Social networking hit the mainstream in the first decade of the 21st century, and these days, it is hard to encounter someone who doesn't have an online profile.

Kat Hannaford, news editor of T3 Magazine, says Facebook and Twitter are the two market leaders.

"I'd say that the race is between Facebook and Twitter now. I mean Facebook is still striding ahead, they've still got many more million users than Twitter has. But it's early days for Twitter, I mean Facebook was founded in 2004, and Twitter really only came to prominence in the last 12 months."

With all these life-changing developments over the past decade, one can only wonder what the next 10 years have in store. Friess says the next step in communication will be directly linked to our bodies.

"You know there are people who are inventing technology which actually gets implanted into our bodies, and they will control certain points of machinery around us and disfunctioning parts of our body. This is very exciting."

It sounds like the future might look a bit as we know it. With mobile phones now resembling the "communicators" from the 1960s sci-fi series Star Trek, who knows when we might be able to transport ourselves around at the flick of a button?