Transcript.
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"Now to an exclusive look at the new ways we'll be communicating with each other in the very near future, The iPad has just gone on the market in the US , and it's just the start of a high tech saturation of new products. From computers to phones, here's what's coming."
"Fantasy of the 1980's, now a reality."
"This isn't a Hoverboard, but it's almost as good."
"Self confessed Technology Geek, Jonathan Wrigley, paid double the $500 iPad price tag, for a friend to bring one back from the American Launch. Now he's one of the first to own one in Australia."
"If I had a whole box of them, I could sell them... It would be gone within a day I would imagine."
"A cross between a laptop and mobile phone, 300,000 were sold in the United States in just one day. Due to be released in Australia later this month."
"The fact that you are dealing with all of the stuff in a very hands on way, really does make it a lot more engaging.
To launch something, you just tap on it.
What it's capable of now is by no means indicative of what it will be capable of, 6 months from now."
"But it's not only the Americans that are coming up with such ground breaking technology."
"So Linda, this is the future of business meetings"
"It's called Real Presence Conferencing."
"So I'm going to call Sydney now.There they are. Hello"
"This is quicker to organise, um, you can get people together really quickly, and have a meeting like you are in the same room."
"The conference room in Melbourne has four small cameras pointing at the table. And the image is beamed directly into the conference room in Sydney. In just a few years, the cost of buying and installing these has gone from half a million to a hundred thousand. Professor Hugh Barlow is Telstra's Mr Gadget."
"We are probably looking in the two to five year time frame, you'll see these become more common place."
"I guess it saves on flights, travel time,"
"Greenhouse emissions. The biggest saving to businesses is of course the cost of travel, and of the time. Wasted at airports and on planes and things."
"In a hundred and forty years, the telephone has come a long way. Alexander Bell developed it to allow two people to have basic communication, who were separated by distance.This takes it to a whole new level."
"We'd been trying, in the industry, video phones, for twenty or thirty years, but we've never been at a point where you could get a good quality picture, because the network, the phone network, was not able to support that.
If I want to phone, um, Judy, I just press the button and make the cal, and you'll see, because Judy's at a video phone - Hi Judy - um."
"Hello Hugh"
"I can just pop her up."
"When 3G mobile phones came out, video calling was seen as the killer app, and we were all going to be, you know, walking around, talking to people and seeing them like we were Flash Gordon. But it didn't really take off."
"Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson, is the Courier Mail's technology expert."
"People don't necessarily want to be seen all the time."
"What is said to be popular, and in homes even sooner is this. The T-Hub."
"You can do things that you are used to doing from a mobile phone. For example, when you phone from your mobile, you choose the persons name, you don't dial in the number any more. But the other thing about it is it connects to the internet, so if you want to see the weather today. You're going up to Sydney, say. You click on the the Weather..."
"So this could be a remote control for anything in the house?"
"Absolutely."
"If you'd thought the home phone was becoming obsolete, this will revive it like never before."
"You can either buy the device outright at a few hundred dollars, or you can actually get it on a subscription as part of a package."
"In the last 6 months of the year, we made 325 million fewer local phone calls. Which is a huge drop. Like, they, they really felt that in their profits. So it's in their best interests to try and get us to keep our home phones."
"It's better than on the little screen."
"Yeah"
"If you look at Star Trek, they actually had a device in it called the PADD. P A double D. And it's just ironic that something so close, in terms of name, and in terms of function should come out."
"Proving that anything is possible."
"I'd personally look forward to the Hoverboard."
"We all look forward to that. Linda Kincaid reporting there."
