I can't say I was really ever a huge fan of Dick Tracy.
He was a comic strip character my parents referenced on occasion as I was growing up. Naturally, this made me instinctively stick any idea of him in a musty box along with those stories about walking uphill in snow both ways to school.
When I was really young, owing to Tracy's flamboyantly sunny choice of trench coat colour, I also couldn't tell him from The Man with the Yellow Hat from the Curious George books. I remember always feeling disappointed when I realized the comic or cartoon I was looking at had nothing at all to do with mischievous monkeys.
About the only thing I really dug about the hard-hitting, fast-shooting police detective was his famous two-way wrist radio (introduced in 1946), which became a two-way wrist TV in 1964.
That was one high-tech device, and like Star Trek's communicators, it was the precursor to later technological developments such as the cell phone.
Years ago when webcams first became widely available (and affordable), I was thrilled to be sitting in an apartment in Vancouver shouting at a stuttering, grainy image of my buddy in Montreal on the screen.
But cell phones were getting smaller and smaller, the Internet was getting faster and faster, and here was a technology that allowed me to communicate (shouting is still communicating) with someone while viewing them "live" on my screen.
I thought wrist videophone devices were just around the corner.
That was about 10 years ago.
Well, videophones are a reality as of now, although they're maybe not quite what we expected.
At the beginning of the New Year, Skype, a popular Internet telephone service, upgraded its iPhone application (app) to make video calling available for Apple products.
Until now, the iPhone 4 (with its two cameras - one facing the user, one in back), and a couple of the newer, but lesser-known smart phones, offered a two-way video call feature. But you could only call another person with an iPhone 4, and it had to be through a Wi-Fi (hotspot) connection, not through your phone network.
However, the upgrade to Skype's mobile app works for the older (3Gs) iPhones as well, although - since the camera is on the back of the phone - you do have to make clever use of a mirror to get the face-to-face thing going.
You don't have to use an Internet-connected hotspot, either, to use Skype on your iPhone.
Plus, Skype is also what a large number of people use to video chat or just message online using their Macs and PCs, so logging into Skype on your iPhone will let you see and chat with friends who don't even have cell phones.
It certainly opens up a whole new and real-time level of sharing.
This will likely make mobile video chatting a mainstream thing.
Plus, cell phones are getting faster and faster, and screens are getting smaller and smaller - so I'm sure a true wrist videophone is really just around the corner.
I just hope it doesn't take another 10 years.
In the meantime, as soon as I figure out how to strap my iPhone to my wrist, I'm buying a lemon-yellow trench coat.
