Salivating over technology
I never used to be like this, I swear. Technology was always just technology, just a tool, not a fetish. But more recently, I've felt something shifting in the wind. These days, something moves in my guts when I spot a sleek handheld device - a phone, a BlackBerry, an Ipod. I blame my time in Japan. Mobile phone culture is huge there, and I slotted right in. It was two months before I could afford my own keitai (mobile) and start adorning it with trinkets and photos, two months before I could play games on the train and covertly snap pictures of geisha and check the train timetables on the net, two months during which I felt out of the loop as never before. Since then, I've become a bit obsessed with mobiles. Not because the sleek lines and blinking lights of the sexier models, but because of what is possible with a mobile phone. The phone-walkman is already here, in basic form, but there's so much more that I find myself fantasising about. It's disturbing, I know, but so exciting. In Africa, fixed phone lines remain a rarity - infrastructure and initiative are lacking. But mobile phone use is booming - they've skipped an entire step.
This is what I want mobiles to be able to do:
- Tell you where you are, and display your location on a scalable map. This is readily achievable, I think, given mobiles use the triangulation method
to determine the strongest signal. Mobiles with maps could double as cheap GPS in cars when plugged in.
- Display the locations of your friends on a map. It would work like MSN, so you could choose your status: Busy, Away, At Work, Ready for a beer, and so on.
- Contain a USB-compatible data chip to lug around your work
- Be able to act as a universal remote control
- Incorporate the function of Ipods and digital music players with massive storage. Radio would be a nice touch, too.
- The internet and email. In Japan, you can send a SMS to an email address, and you can email a phone from your computer. Very handy. The net on phones has been pretty over-hyped, but a train timetable and news/sport headlines would be useful.
- Display MSN-style emoticons to make messages more nuanced.
- Double as decent digital still and video cameras.
God, how long must we wait? I need one. I want one. How can we live without something like this?
I never used to be like this, I swear. Technology was always just technology, just a tool, not a fetish. But more recently, I've felt something shifting in the wind. These days, something moves in my guts when I spot a sleek handheld device - a phone, a BlackBerry, an Ipod. I blame my time in Japan. Mobile phone culture is huge there, and I slotted right in. It was two months before I could afford my own keitai (mobile) and start adorning it with trinkets and photos, two months before I could play games on the train and covertly snap pictures of geisha and check the train timetables on the net, two months during which I felt out of the loop as never before. Since then, I've become a bit obsessed with mobiles. Not because the sleek lines and blinking lights of the sexier models, but because of what is possible with a mobile phone. The phone-walkman is already here, in basic form, but there's so much more that I find myself fantasising about. It's disturbing, I know, but so exciting. In Africa, fixed phone lines remain a rarity - infrastructure and initiative are lacking. But mobile phone use is booming - they've skipped an entire step.
This is what I want mobiles to be able to do:
- Tell you where you are, and display your location on a scalable map. This is readily achievable, I think, given mobiles use the triangulation method
to determine the strongest signal. Mobiles with maps could double as cheap GPS in cars when plugged in.
- Display the locations of your friends on a map. It would work like MSN, so you could choose your status: Busy, Away, At Work, Ready for a beer, and so on.
- Contain a USB-compatible data chip to lug around your work
- Be able to act as a universal remote control
- Incorporate the function of Ipods and digital music players with massive storage. Radio would be a nice touch, too.
- The internet and email. In Japan, you can send a SMS to an email address, and you can email a phone from your computer. Very handy. The net on phones has been pretty over-hyped, but a train timetable and news/sport headlines would be useful.
- Display MSN-style emoticons to make messages more nuanced.
- Double as decent digital still and video cameras.
God, how long must we wait? I need one. I want one. How can we live without something like this?
posted by Doug @ 12/08/2005 05:12:00 pm
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