Idle Thoughts

In 1987 I joined Motorola, UK as a software engineer in their computer division. At the time, the company was known mainly for it’s car radios and among techies for their range of microprocessors and embedded computer boards. As a company, they were also involved in producing the first generation of mobile phones, or housebricks as they were called by anyine who saw them. As the technology improved, the size and weight of these phones was reduced, to the point where you could actually carry them around - without risking one arm getting stretched by the excess weight. So it was that nearly a year after I joined, in 1988, we were all issued with walkie-talkie style mobiles.

This uncharacteristic display of largess was partly to help us while we were out with clients and partly as a marketing exercise. At the time mobiles were a very rare sight - you simply didn’t see people walking in the street with a phone to their ear. They were also quite a head-turner. Having your phone ring while in a public place or (better) a trade show would cause people to stop and look. Occasionally, a complete stranger would come up and ask to have a look at it. This could have been one of Motorola’s ulterior motives, given some of our high-profile clients. I’m sure they got more than a few orders from our computer-systems clients when they saw what a difference it made and the prestige it imparted. (Little did they know where that would lead!)

Time moved on and the technology improved further. The original phones were superceded by smaller models that could, at a stretch fit in a pocket. The biggest progress was in reducing the power conumption of these beasties. They didn’t exactly glow when they were used, but the power drain was considerable and that meant the batteries had to be BIG. The newer, smaller models had better electronics which weren’t so power hungry and therefore could last longer on smaller batteries - which were themselves becoming more capacious. The smaller size did bring one disadvantage, that any modern day user would recognise - where’s my phone gone?

These phones were strictly business: dial, speak, listen, hang-up. Given the cost of calls (33p per minute - one area where there hasn’t been much progress in the past 20 years) was slightly higher than the cost per minute of phoning the USA, calls tended to be brief, and somewhat prone to the “you’re breaking up ….. what did you say? …. I said you’re breaking up” style of conversation. The display on the phone was also quite basic: just enough space to show the number you were calling. As for features like SMS text and games, these were years away.

More time passed. The phone companies were starting to expand their markets. Instead of being toys for early-adopters they were becoming more mainstream business accessories - although the high cost of calls still prevented them from being widely used outside a work environment. The move from analog systems to digital phones in the early ’90’s helped to improve the call quality and also laid the foundation for texting. Personally, I beleive this is what led to “ordinary” people buying phones for their own use. It became possible to communicate (provided the other party had a mobile, too) more cheaply than before, if in rather abbreviated terms. The cost of the handsets still meant that phones were 1 per household items - certainly not something for children. Some things were still the same as on the earliest phones: the displays were strictly functional. Mostly they displayed text and numbers, almost always in black-and-white. Phone manufacturers differentiated their products on size, price, the capacity of the address-book and battery life. There was no need (and probably no demand, either) for games, cameras, reminders, or even colour screens. Apart from SMS and changes in the underlying technology, the phones I had in the mid-90’s would be directly recognisable and understanable by someone who hadn’t used a mobile since 10 years earlier.

The same could not be said of progress during the next 10 years.

Although the form-factor of the phones settled down - due I think, by the inability to make the keyboards any smaller and the need to have a powerful enough battery, this was the time when features really multiplied in number if not in utility. Colour screens use more power than their duller, slower monochrome predecessors. This led to the adoption of better battery chemistry, with the old “nicad” batteries giving way to more powerful and expensive NiMH and later to the Lithium Ion batteries we use now. The phones also started to get more features: games and small applications were making an entrance, although it’s by no means certain if the hype they received was matched by customer enthusiasm. I still recall the frustrations I had trying to navigate through layers and layers of menu items to add names and addresses and even more menus to change the time twice a year when BST came and went.

The phone I use now is a Nokia that I’ve had for about 18 months. In terms of what I want (dial, speak, listen, hang-up) it does the job. It has many, many functions I have never used as well as some menus I am literally scared to enter (what is a “preferred access point, or “user certificate”?) in case I mess something up and can never get it back again. So far as the games and applications it contains, I have never felt the inclination to find out what it can do. It has an organiser with calendars, to-do lists, stopwatches and timers and tons of other features on top. It also has an in-built radio that I must admit to having tried - once. It can play music, but only a track at a time (so every 3 minutes, you have to manually go to the next track and start it going again). It has a built in camera which is nice. I now take photos, well snaps really, willy-nilly and then instantly forget about them. Weeks or months later when I stumble across the photos, I either can’t recall why I thought a topic was worthy or realise that what looked good on a postage-stamp sized screen exhibits a huge lack of focus or enough camera-shake to make the picture an embarassment, when seen in it’s full resolution.

I realise that by admitting my phone is over a year old puts me way behind in the technology stakes. As a fully paid up geek I should be collecting my emails while on the move, connecting wirelessly to any mobile hotspot I come across (including ones on coaches and trains) and navigating by means of a touch-screen through my entire collection of movies, albums and every photo I have ever taken. In practice I find that being permanently contactable is definitely overrated. Watching films on a screen the size of my thumb is not a pleasure and touch sensitive screens, as well as needing both hands to use, leaves an inevitable layer of dirt, grease and worse on the front of a phone.

Where does that leave my relationship with my phone? There are three functions I would really like to see (apart from being able to listen to a complete album with 1 button press). The first is “forensic” quality call recording. The who, when and what from both sides of the conversation. It would be nice to be able to get information about where the other party was, too. The second feature is to have the phone’s clock get the time off the network, rather than having to enter it by hand, and change the hour twice a year, and put it right if it gains or loses time, and change it again when you travel to a different timezone. Technically these are feasible and relatively easy to implement (certainly easier than writing a sudoku game that no-one ever plays). Culturally there is some resistance to having a call recorded - although people seem perfectly happy for texts to live forever. Some also seem to be happy to bawl out their side of any conversation, no matter how intimate, to everyone within earshot. The third function I would like to have is the ability to send a ring-tone to someone I am calling. I can see some scope for misuse of this (abusive ringtones, advertising, putting the message in the ringtone ”for free” etc.) so it may have to be limited to the tones you can create on the phone’s keypad - rather than full-blown MP3 style downloadable ringtones.

What about the next 20 years? who knows. It may be that the implementation of the mobile phone has plateaued - it may morph into something completely unrecognisable or even become so integrated into our lives that it becomes invisible. I am sure however, that the phone companies will find new features and services to keep their profits flowing.