Future Phone, 7 plus or minus 2

I had this thought swirling around my head this morning that wouldn't go away.  What I usually do in such cases is write down enough to be satisfied and then continue on with whatever I was doing.  However, today involved building an image, so after quickly sketching it up in gimp I figured I might as well post it somewhere.

I was thinking about how we make phone calls. 

1. Originally we called an operator and asked to be connected to a house address (i.e. using words)
2. We switched to a 7 digit number
3. There were so many phone numbers we had to add the area code every time you dialed, so it became a 10 digit number
4. (I'm ignoring countries outside the US, sorry but you guys have a ton of numbers to dial)
5. With the phone Address book it seems we're almost back to the original model of connecting using words

 * There shall be no implications what-so-ever that I know anything about the history of telecommunications from this list, although I did take a very interesting telecom class in college.

This got me to thinking: how else could we make calls other than using the number method?

The address book has pretty much eliminated the need for memorizing a phone number, although you could think of that number as being a good unique key into the world "database" of phones.

That's it.  Thanks for the ear internet.

Built this fairly quickly in gimp, I'm not sure why everyone complains about it being too confusing to use.