Finally, mobiles are living up to their early promise.
I've reported on the advance of computer technology since the mid 1980s, so my ambivalence towards mobile phones really doesn't make sense. I've always had one of the wretched things and some of the pieces in my museum of technology obsolescence - such as the Ericsson DH318, a small brick
with an ungainly protruding rubber aerial - are now collector's items.
I've also tried out all manner of mobile fashion - from fliptops to palmtops to bulky PDAs (personal digital assistants, remember them?) carried in a geek chic belt holster.
I was there when it all began. In 1999 I wrote: "After an exhilarating hour hooning over a postcard landscape of pristine snow woven between pine trees and atop frozen lakes, it seems entirely appropriate to stop the snowmobile and phone home." That was in Finland, where Nokia was showing me what mobiles could do - how the devices would soon be combined with cameras and how I'd be able to send a digital postcard of my snowmobile safari through the air.
Not to be outdone, Ericsson in 2001 put me on a sled pulled by huskies 200km north of the Arctic Circle. By then, bluetooth was the buzz and the Ericsson techies were raving about location-based mobile phone services and the bizarre idea of a phone encounter group - broadcasting texts to tell your friends where you were, in my case at the Ice Hotel in Sweden drinking blue Absolut from an ice cube glass.
Incredibly in 1999, 62 per cent of the population in Finland used a mobile compared with 27 per cent in New Zealand. That was then. And while all the over-hyped features - decent digital cameras, video calling, location-based services and fast internet connectivity - have come to pass, I'm still ambivalent.
I've always been a reluctant texter, never saw the point of viewing the web on a tiny screen and loathe the idea of email constantly coming at you. Mobile marketeers categorised me as "stuck in a rut" or a "cost-conscious resister".
In part that's because until recently convergent mobiles - devices morphing phone, computer, camera, radio and Swiss army knife - always lacked something. The camera took crap pictures, the screen was too small or lacking in resolution, the internet was too slow, it didn't have Wi-Fi, and so on. But it was also because I couldn't be bothered. I didn't find any of the features particularly useful or convenient. If anything, they were intrusive, time wasting and depleted a rare commodity - quiet, unconnected time.
Now that the smartphone era is upon us, two players - Apple and Google - have transformed what phones can do and threaten to undermine my ambivalence. Apple set the scene with the iPhone and its alluring touch screen and gestures - tap, slide, swipe, pinch ... Suddenly, the small phone screen became vast and navigation was intuitive.
Rule No1 when buying a smartphone: make sure the touch screen is capacitive rather than resistive. You also really want multi-touch. Pinching the screen to zoom in and out rather than hitting a magnify key is one of those interface inventions that is at once brilliant and yet so obvious you wonder why it took so long to happen.
There is a downside. Touchscreens are so seductive, it's easy to become a jabscreen addict. Or worse, a jibber jabber - one who insists on boring you with all the cool stuff their smartphone can do.
But while slip-side gestures have revitalised phones, so too has voice recognition. Trying it recently on a 2degrees phone, the Ideos U8150 by Huawei, I was amazed by how well it works - not just for activating calls and texts but also for searching the web. Speak to Google and it obeys.
The Ideos U8150 ($379) comes with Google's Android 2.2 operating system and includes GPS navigation combined with Google Maps - useful when you're lost in a strange city. I tested it on the ferry from Devonport, watched my journey across the harbour to the wharf and then said "Wyndham St" to the phone, which duly mapped my path, speaking directions to me along the way. If you want, and your friends agree, you can also see by GPS where your friends are - although the very idea of such an arrangement creeps me out.
I also surrendered to email on the phone - even though I've watched with disdain how it permanently tethers users to their Blackberry things that blip incessantly with incoming mail.
Getting a copy of your email travelling with you can actually be quite handy, even if does mean reading messages twice.
But there is the issue of being beholden to multinational companies such as Apple or Google, which dictate from a central source how things will be, and in the process erode the essential openness of the internet. In theory, Google Android phones are more open than the closed-off, proprietary Apple, but in practice with the way some carriers and manufactures lock down, modify and fragment Android features, the openness is somewhat illusory.
At the moment, with plenty of competition in the smartphone market, the real winner is the consumer - spoiled for choice in features and with new apps arriving daily. Long may it continue.
So, belatedly, this mobile phone resister is joining the throng. Though you have to draw the line at some things, such as Twitter. Sorry, but I'm not ready to broadcast 140-character updates on what I'm doing or thinking at any given time. And I'm not inclined to "follow" someone who does.
Plus it can be dangerous - as Paul Chambers recently found out when he was convicted of "menace" and lost his job for threatening to blow up Doncaster's Robin Hood Airport in a Twitter joke.
I also know you can never say never. Until a few weeks ago I had avoided having a Gmail account - but in using the Ideos phone, there was really no option. So although I'll continue trying to avoid the thoughtstream of the twitterers and defy Facebook's march towards world domination, now that I've succumbed to the smartphone's wiles, I suspect resistance is futile.
chris.barton@nzherald.co.nz
