Attention American parents: Mobile phones and text messages are sexually molesting our children!!! Ah, CNN...
The Indian letter writing industry (for those who are unable to write themselves) is all but extinct because of near-ubiquitous mobile phones and text messaging.
Mr. Sawant mourns the demise of the letter culture. After dropping a letter in the box, he used to imagine its winding journey. Someone far away would open what he had written on someone else's behalf; the reader would savor its kind words or its little secrets, then maybe file it away in a box, and perhaps revisit it weeks later in a burst of nostalgia.
But even Sawant admits that ringing his daughter on his mobile is much easier than writing a letter.
Remembrance of Phones Past
I once went through a painful, protracted breakup, conducted almost entirely over this LG phone. It wasn't a bad phone, but to this day, even a picture of it is like a punch to the gut - its Major-thirds ringtone, the wallpaper mocking my heartache with its cheery blue sky. I feel a little nauseous even describing it (my description may just be nauseating, in fairness).
In 2001, I spoke to my father on this Kyocera smartphone from 8th Avenue, having run up the block from work just in time to see the first tower fall. I don't have to go into all the emotional baggage which that implies.
Now, in my current phase, I probably don't have enough perspective to characterize what of me is reflected in my current phone, but I think that in a while, I'll have an idea.
Since the time began that we were never to be found without our mobile phones (or whichever portable devices, for that matter), I feel that somehow all of the memories of the current chapter of my life are being constantly averaged out and inextricably linked to the phone that I'm using.
Do you have any similar experiences to share? Do you think that linking my identity to my gadgets entails a sort of anthropomorphism? What do you think Proust would have to say about all this? (I've never read Proust, so I'm honestly asking.) Other insightful references to prior discussions or great thinkers would be helpful as well.
Update: Michael Leddy at orange crate art has been mining his Proust and has turned up an incredibly relevant passage to the discussion:
...a thing which we have looked at long ago, if we see it again, brings back to us, along with our original gaze, all the images which that gaze contained. This is because things -- a book in its red binding, like the rest -- at the moment we notice them, turn within us into something immaterial, akin to all the preoccupations or sensations we have at that particular time, and mingle indissolubly with them.
-Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
The design of the iPhone is such that all other mobile phones, including those released after the iPhone, look not only old but antiquated and even defective. IMO.
1984 all over again?
Google recently announced that a bunch of companies (aka the Open Handset Alliance) were getting together to make cell phones that run on an open platform called Android. That was a couple of days ago so maybe someone else has already made the imperfect comparison between this and Mac vs. PC circa 1984, but if not:
Or perhaps Steven Frank has it right:
A 34-company committee couldn't create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite.
As people exchange their land lines for mobile phones, phone books are getting smaller. "Americans have not been eager to list their cell numbers in phone books. Consumers and privacy advocates balked at the idea in 2004, when most of the big wireless carriers said they wanted to compile a nationwide directory. Cellphones may make it easier for people to reach each other, yet Americans are very guarded about whom they want calling them."
Profile by Ken Auletta of Walt Mossberg, the WSJ's technology columnist. It was interesting reading Mossberg's opinion of the Sprint/Samsung UpStage. A couple friends of mine were testing this phone before it came out and it was one of the most poorly designed technology products that I've ever held in my hand. Who knows if the iPhone will actually be worth a crap, but Steve Jobs must rub his hands together with glee when he sees his competitors come out with stuff like this. Mossberg was too easy on it. Auletta has previously profiled Barry Diller, Pointcast, Andy Grove, and Nathan Myhrvold for the New Yorker.
Adam and David recently reminded me of pocket, an episode of 0sil8 I did back in 2001 (the second-to-last episode actually):
pocket was a broadcast mailing list for mobile phones. People signed up and then I sent them SMS messages on their phones periodically. As I recall it only lasted a few weeks before I shut it down; there just didn't seem to be anything interesting about broadcasting short messages to a group of friends and strangers.
Jargon watch: "book" as a synonym for "cool". Sample usage: "That YouTube video is so book." As books are decidedly uncool, you might wonder how this usage came about. Book is a T9onym of cool...both words require pressing 2665 on the keypad of a mobile phone but book comes up before cool in the T9 dictionary, leading to inadvertent uses of the former for the latter. (thx, david)
Regarding some of the points in my iPhone round-up from yesterday, David Pogue has some answers to those questions and a whole lot more in his iPhone FAQ. "Is it ambidextrous? -No." What does that even mean? As a lefty, am I out of luck? (via df)
Comparison of the iPhone with other smart phones...a nice companion piece to the comparison of my cardboard iPhone to various iPods, mobile phones, etc. So far, the market thinks that Apple's got something good on their hands: Apple stock was up $7.10 today while RIMM (makers of Blackberry) dropped $11.16.
Interesting (and probably fake) photo of Apple's alleged iPhone, which phone has no buttons...only a screen and a mousepad.
Some mobile phones come with water damage stickers that change color when they get wet, thereby voiding the warranty on your phone if it stops working, no matter if the color change and the breakage is related. "As a designer, I would much prefer to look at the problem as 'How can we improve the sealing of phones so that water ingress is no longer a major problem?' than 'How can we design something to cover our backs and shift all the blame onto the user for our design fault?'"
More and more people are using their mobile phones to tell time instead of watches. Telling time has always been the #1 function I use on my phone.
Joe Malia's privacy scarves provide mobile phone users and portable video game players with privacy, a light/glare-free texting/playing environment, and warm necks. "Users of the wearable mobile phone scarf can venture into public spaces confident that if the need to compose a private text message were to arise the object could be pulled over the face to create an isolated environment." (via eyeteeth)
Cl1ff N0t3s for the millennials: mobile service will condense books into short text messages. "For example, Hamlet's famous line: 'To be or not to be, that is the question' becomes '2b? Nt2b? ???'".
Sweethearting, part 2
Got quite a few emails in response to my post on sweethearting/pinging. Several people mentioned pranking[1] as a current implementation of this idea, a trick I remember using as a kid. You call someone and hang up after one ring..."prank me when you're outside my apartment and I'll come down". Pranking is typically driven by economics...you don't pay for a phone call that doesn't connect.
Gen Kanai asks: "why can't SMS do this?" It certainly can; if I were implementing sweethearting, I would piggyback it on SMS. But what I'm really concerned with (as usual) is the user experience. To send a blank text message to a specific recipient with my phone takes at least 6-10 keystrokes. I want to do it in two keystrokes and (in time) without looking.
[1] I received reports of pranking being used all over the world. It's called one-belling (or pranking) in England, people send "toques" (roughly "touches") or "sting" each other in Spain, Italians "fare uno squillo" (which Google translates as "to make one blast"), and in Finland it's called "bombing".
Update: In South Africa, they call it a "Scotch call".
Sweethearting
Here's a feature I would like on my mobile phone: the ability to "ping" someone with 2 or less keypresses (something that takes around a second to do), even if the keypad is locked. The idea is that when I press a couple of buttons on my phone (say, 1#), a tiny content-less message is sent to the person corresponding to that key combination. On their end, they see something like "Jason pinged you at 7:34pm" with the option to ping right back. You'd have to set up what pings mean beforehand, stuff like "I'm leaving work now" or "remember to pick up milk at the store".
Pings would be perfect for situations when texting or a phone call is too time consuming, distracting, or takes you out of the flow of your present experience. If you call your husband on the way home from work every night and say the same thing each time, perhaps a ping would be better...you wouldn't have to call and your husband wouldn't have to stop what he was doing to answer the phone. You could even call it the "sweetheart ping" or "sweethearting"...in the absence of a prearraged "ping me when you're leaving", you could ping someone to let them know you're thinking about them.
This reminds me a bit of Matt Webb's Glancing project: I'm Ok, you're Ok. I guess you could think of pinging as eye contact via mobile phone...just enough information is conveyed to be useful, but not so much that it disrupts what you're already doing. Webb cites Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs:
Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs gives a good example of text messaging being used for this. He talked about kids in Sweden after a party. Say you've seen someone you quite liked and you'd like to see them again, but don't know if the feeling's shared. You'd send them a blank text message, or maybe just a really bland one like "hey, good party". If they reply, ask for a date. The first message is almost entirely expressive communication: tentative, deniable.
Matt does a fine job explaining why this stripped-down style of communication is sometimes preferable to more robust alternatives.
Mobile usage
Quite a few folks are pointing to the results of this survey (graph here) about what features people want on their most frequently used mobile devices. The results are interesting but also probably misleading in about 1000 different ways (text messaging didn't even make the list). But it got me thinking about how I use my most frequently used digital device, my mobile phone. In order of a combination of most usage and importance, here's what I use my phone for:
- Clock. I don't wear a watch, so I look at my phone all the time to check the time.
- Taking pictures + sending them to Flickr.
- Voice. I dislike talking on the phone, but when you gotta, you gotta.
- Text messaging. Texting is preferable to voice in many instances and many friends text more often than they call nowadays.
- Taking pictures. I think of this as distinct from the photo + Flickr usage above. The camera on my phone just isn't that important to me without the ability to easily publish them to the Web.
Stuff I don't want on my phone:
- Music. I am unconvinced of the wisdom of cramming a music player into a phone. The user experience needs to be solved first.
- Email. I still use client-side spam filtering so reading my mail on a phone would be a painful exercise. And I can send email from my phone and that's enough...I can handle not reading my email for hours on end.
- Web browsing. I love the Web, but my preferred portable device for accessing it is my laptop. Not worth the extra expense of adding it to my service plan.
What's your most-used portable device and what do you use it for? Feel free to comment here or link to a post on your site.
This is odd...you need a mobile phone to sign up for Gmail (or get an invite from a current user). Well, I guess that's not a whole lot more strange than needing an email address to sign up for an email account.
The Firefly is a cell phone for kids. It doesn't have a keypad, but it's got dedicated buttons for calling mom and dad and accessing the parentally controlled address book.
Barcode tattoos + mobile phones with cameras = business card (or, say, a list of your sexual preferences) on your arm.
Billboard is now tracking the top-selling ringtones. The list seems to track pretty close to the top singles list. Well, except for the Super Mario Bros theme song ringtone. (via rw)
How to use your cell phone anywhere in the world. Get a GSM phone, pay through the nose for roaming, or unlock your phone and use local pay-as-you-go SIM cards wherever you are.
Nokia.com comes up first in a Google search for "motorola mobile phones". I suspect it's because Motorola's site isn't optimized for Google (lots of Flash, little text) and a difference in usage: it's "cell phones" in the US versus "mobile phones" in Europe (where Nokia is from).
Get rid of cell phone reception dead spots by using cellular repeaters. They're not cheap, but they work.
Walt Mossberg: wireless phone carriers exercise too much control over the technology their customers can use. "I once saw a sign at the offices of a big cellphone carrier that said, 'It isn't a phone until "Harry" says it's a phone.' But why should it be up to Harry (a real carrier employee whose name I have changed)? Why shouldn't the market decide whether a device is a good phone?"
Indian man sends a record 182,689 text messages in a month. His cell phone bill was 1411 pages long.
Two Morse coders beat two text messengers on Leno. That's it...I want a phone with one big button with which to tap out messages.
How Sprint PCS loses customers. Sprint wanted Cam to sign a 2-year contract just to switch plans, even though he had been a customer of theirs for 7 years. He switched to T-Mobile and got a new phone in the process.
