Isn’t technology supposed to take the hassle out of difficult tasks? So why does my life seem to get more complicated with ever new gadget I buy? I long for the days when the toughest decision I had to make was which button was record on the VCR or what type of cassette to get to record the top forty; ninety minutes or sixty minutes. Now my life is a tangle of USB, scart and power leads. The new designs of computers, mobile phones and music players make be stream lined and sleek; they certainly don’t have chunky buttons like my first walkman did, but I still find myself looking for a button to press rather than a screen to touch or a wheel to scroll.
Mobile phones are a case in point. I recently decided to upgrade the brick that I’ve been carrying around for the last few years. I’ll explain. I was late to the mobile phone phenomenon, not even late really. I turned up to the party about three days after it had finished. For years I said I’d never carry around a mobile phone in a vain attempt to look as though I was tech savvy and a modern man. So while all my friends were texting, talking and generally always on the phone when they should have been doing something else, I was sitting in silence.
Of course I now realise that to function in society as it is today you have to have a few essential items. The mobile phone is as much a part of daily life as money and TV. So a few years ago I joined the real world but I didn’t go the whole hog. I bought the most basic phone imaginable and I bought it outright. No contract for me. It seemed like only days after that a new generation of mobile phones were released and my piece of technology, I use the term loosely, looked like it could have been used by Noah when he was rounding up the animals.
But I wasn’t going to be sucked into the all consuming world of mobile phones and I refused to upgrade and so for the next few years I carried my mobile, again I use the term loosely, phone around with me in a rather large case that had a long leather shoulder strap attached to it. If I carried it around for too long it made my shoulder ache but I wasn’t too concerned just as I wasn’t too concerned about the looks I got whenever someone phoned me; I’m sure it looked as though it should have had a lead attached to it that plugged into the wall.
That situation couldn’t last, my work colleagues were fast becoming another species that I didn’t recognise and with the introduction of the internet, picture messaging, cameras, videos and social networking sites my handset had to go…probably to a museum. So I decided to join the human race and get a proper phone. A new phone with all of the above and more. I went to the newsagent and bought a magazine that had all the latest mobile phone reviews in it and locked myself away for three days while I tried to make a decision.
Now if you’ve ever seen the latest mobile phone reviews and, like me, you’re not what you could call a geek then you’ll know what I mean when I say, ‘What does it all mean?” I read and reread every mobile phone review in the magazine and still didn’t have a clue what half of it was. So I did what I always do in that situation, I chose the one with a picture of James Bond next to it!
So now I have a top of the range phone that does everything you can possibly imagine. All I have to do now is find the ON switch.
Dominic Donaldson is an expert in the mobile phone industry.
Find out more about mobile phone reviews and gadgets.
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