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Google Voice is a service where you can get one local number and have it set to ring all your phones. This is great if you have a home, work and cell phone because you can give one number and have it ring everywhere. You can also have voicemails transcribed to text and emailed to you as well as have your text messages emailed to you. Also you can schedule it to ring certain phone numbers at certain times! This is perfect if you don’t already have a well known number because then you can give everyone you know one number and then when you recieve calls, you can pick up on whatever phone is convenient for you. You can also replace your cell phone voicemail with Google Voicemail giving you a centralized voicemail box that can be accessed over the internet. I think it will be a great way to centralize all you phones and just to get one number to ring them all. One downside though is because it is still a semi new product, it is invitation only but, if you can get an invitation, theyn give it a try to have one number to ring al your phones!

When the idea of Google Wave came out, I got excited and thought that it will be a revolutionary communication platform. Then, I began to use it and i realized it really is nothing special. I was excited when I got ther invitation but, unless I am really missing something major, I don’t see the point of using Wave.

With Google Wave you can send messages, called Waves, in real-time to friends and you can collaborate in realtime. The biggest flaw in that is that very few people currently have Google Wave so there are very few people to communicate with and even then, the feature set is scarse. I think that if the application store that is rumored to come through may save Wave, but as it stands right now it is not as revolutionary as it claimed to be. I really hope that Google works to add more features and innovate, which Google is quite good at. If they do this, then they could easily make it the revolutionary platform that it set out to be. However, as it stands right now, I prefer regular email to Wave as of right now and think Google has a long way to go to make Google Wave the next “wave” in communication.

The average cell phone uses a three letter per key input for text input. However, this is very slow even for a seasoned user it is much slower than a QWERTY keyboard. Also if you even want to use double letters or just two characters on the same key, you will have to wait. This is where QWERTY comes in, QWERTY is which is a single letter key keyboard because it has a key for each character, users can input text much faster! The one downside of these is the fact that they take up more space and generally QWERTY phones are a bit larger in size. There are two main types of QWERTY keyboards: hardware and touch screen although they both have their pros and cons, which I will compare later this week. I believe that the era of multi-character keyboards is over and I reccommend everyone who is looking for a new phone and uses text input at all should get a QWERTY keyboard because they will save you, the user time in the long run.

Anymore, more and more people are using text based messaging like SMS and Instant Messaging to communicate and use voice messaging like phone calls less. Many people believe that text could replace voice but, I think the opposite because text does not allow you to hear a person’s voice and hear their connotation and hear if they are being serious or not. I think text is good for quick messages to save time but over all, voice will still be prefered and I think will someday expand to video as well.

I already explained my distaste for radio, because it is outdated but, there is one thing that I dislike even more than radio, that is satellite radio, because very few people still listn tro terrestial radio so, why would people want to pay loads of money for satellite radio? Satellite radio offers subscribers commercial-free broadcasts that can be listened to anywhee, while terrestial radio is limited to a certain area and have numerous commercial breaks.

Although there are some benifits to satelittle radio,  there are two major fees involved with becoming a satelite radio subscriber: first, there is buying the reciever  which can be anywhere between $40 and $300, then after that there is the month subscription fee which can be anywhere from $6.99 to $18 each month, depending on how many channels you want.

I cannot understand why people would pay loads of money when they can get similar services for free!  Services like Pandora is an alternative to music radio and podcasts are alternatives for talk radio. If you are not able to access the internet, then you could just listen to bought music on your ipod. As fazr as i’m concerned, there is absolutly no point in paying for satellite radio  and because of the current economic crisis we have experienced SirusXM has filed for bankrupcy protection because people have been cutting back on frivolus spending. I do not think this will last nearly as long as radio and is just a passing trend.

With as many people who use email as their primary communication tool, I think that delivered postal mail better known online as “Snail Mail” is no longer necessary. I cannot remember the last time that I sent a written letter, while I send at least 2 e-mails everyday! Even important mail like bills can now be paid online with a credit card! The Internet can be used to send both card and share pictures, which are, even more things that do not need to be sent by postal mail. Money can be transferred or gifted via Paypal or any other similar service. The other advantage of communicating over the internet is that messages are received instantly while, postal mail takes at least 2 days to be received.

One service that needs to continue is for physical packages because that cannot be done any other way currently.  But, that will have to continue still!

In this highly computerized world I truly do not see the point of a person having a landline phone number. Anymore, everyone has a cellular phone that they carry around with them anywhere. Plus, if they want a phone line that they can have at  home Skype is a great option as are many voice-over-IP or VOIP solutions could be a great replacement. Not only can you access you VoIP from anywhere over the Internet but, you can also save a lot of money, Skype out, or making a call from VOIP to a regular phone number is $2.99 a month for UNLIMITED calls to the US and Canada and for Unlimited calls worldwide that is only $9.99/year. Plus to get a phone number coming in to your computer for receiving calls is $60/year. That is only $96/year and you can take that number anywhere you go and if you want to call unlimited internationally, then it is still about $180/year. That is still probably a major savings over your regular phone bill and can go anywhere!

The one disadvantage, is that you cannot make emergency service calls but, cell phones are. Plus, you are now relying that your Internet service is not down when you need to make the crucial business call. Also if you have a cell phone, then you can take your phone with you anywhere.

I believe that, landlines will evolve into VOIP and will then make the move to primary use of cell phones and then when worldwide WiFi is developed cell phones will switch to VOIP-based cell phones. I believe that these evolutions have already begun and will take full-spring in the next 5 years and then the second revision will come about in another 3-5 years depending on the availability of an omnipotent WiFi network.