Carpenter’s 1981 movie Escape from New York was a dystopian vision of the 1997. There was plenty of technology shown, but I was struck by Lee Van Cleef making a call using a two-handed cell phone:
For comparison, an actual 1997 cell phone on the right (via Niels Hoffmeyer).
Science fiction tends to imagine new technological developments along a particular track, but in reality those developments have been made cheaper and widespread. William Gibson has a good quote: “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” It’s true that we’ve lived through 50 years of development guided by consumer economy. To be fair to the science fiction authors, it was military and government that guided development before that, and that’s where they got their extrapolations from. Things might change.
Another pattern seen in science fiction is that the negative trends tend to get extrapolated and throwing the world off balance. In doing this, they scare the people and get them to change their ways, often overcompensating and driving the trends in the exact opposite direction. Escape from New York warns about crime running wild, but in reality it was the opposite, it became safer. When people think it’s bad, it’s never that bad, because they’re making things better. When people think it’s good, it’s never that good, because they’re making things worse.
Science fiction authors should know their statistical modeling.
You seem to be assuming that it is the goal of science fiction to accurately predict the future. I see no reason why that should be the case.
For what it's worth, the "communicator" on the original Star Trek TV (late 1960s) show was a flip-open, single-hand operation. (I read somewhere, though that the original flip-phone design was cribbed from Star Trek.)
It seems that we can derive from science that the goal in the end is to extend life, make it less complex and extend our future. Assuming this we could say that it would be in science best interest to predict the future. It looks grim now that we have not looked into the future of our own economy until now and look where we are at. According to the new york times we are in a desperate struggle that we may never get out of had we known the future years ago we might have been able to prevent or atleast limit our complete dissolution.
Science main goal is to find the answer to our problems. Predicting the future is complicated science according to cosmos aka the science of everything. Reference CosmosMagazine™: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/672
In conclusion, we are in trouble either way our economy is going down which directly effects science because money is not as readily available for scientific studies.
Science is for predicting the future 'Ubs'