Mobiles and time management

My beloved Diga

I have been using a very basic mobile phone for the last couple of weeks - the snazzily entitled Samsung GTE1080i (why an i?) due to an unfortunate incident involving my HTC Wildfire and a jacuzzi (well when in condos…)

It has taken me two weeks to get to the point that I can text at a decent speed because it has no predictive text and of course no onscreen keyboard.  This got me thinking to back in the day when I had my first phone and how far technology has come since this halcyon days.  That model was a Philips Diga on the BT CellNet network. back in 1997..

DynaTac.  Wow.

and whilst it was not quite on the size level as the Motorola DynaTac then it certainly was a large beast.  It was the first era of pay as you go mobile phones, and my wife and I bought one for each other for our birthdays.  I cannot describe the sheer excitement in 1997 of owning a mobile phone that enabled any person in the street to telephone any other person  - not at home, not through having to queue at a telephone box - but to contact another person who was also in the street or on the bus and generally out and about.  It is no over exaggeration to state that it utterly revolutionised communication, and with it the expectations that people had in terms of meeting up and organizing themselves.  Technology suddenly allowed people to be slightly less planned when arranging a meeting - all of a sudden if you were running late, you were able to telephone the other person to alert them to this.  Prior to this you either were on time to an engagement, or you were not.  The other person either waited for you, or they did not.  No communication mid transit.  

Samsung GTE1080i

Of course the other aspect to the early analogue mobile phones were the SMS capabilities of that era.  These are the self same capabilities that I using right now on my Samsung - terribly exciting in 1997 but needing a certain discipline.  As I am rediscovering, it takes a certain amount of time and concentration to compose even a simple text message, and this has made me think a little more before sending them.  I cannot tweet or Facebook on this phone, and that is at least two less distractions removed from me immediately.  This phone does not even feature Tetris or Snake - unlike my BT Cellnet which had the stunning Snake II - so there are very few distractions.  It does what it is supposed to.  The other day somebody texted me and my phone told me that I had too many messages saved in its memory, which is something that I have not heard for a long time - the maximum number it can handle is 50

This got me thinking of an old article I remember reading in the 00s about time saving tips with technology - so that if you need to delete your text messages you should do so whilst waiting for a bus or in the toilet or in some other situation in which you have unavoidable idle minutes.  But now whilst waiting for a bus people are tweeting or playing Angry Birds Star Wars.

Smartphones of today do everything that PCs of ten years ago did - it is an incredible amount of power in one incredibly small device, and there are numerous benefits to this.  But there are also numerous distractions and I do wonder if, in the days of on screen keyboards and now of course even Siri/Iris style voice recognition - are we lacking the discipline that defined our 1990s use of mobiles?  This also makes me think that technology is both enabling and constraining us - I do not need to be as composed and disciplined in my SMS or Whatsapp or BBM messages any more because I can let fly with another one an instant later.

Razr V3...sigh...

Am I saying that this is a good thing or a bad thing? I think it is simply an evolution of how we are communicating, and of how we manage our time, and of how our device manage our time for us, and take the legwork out of it in many cases.  I think that might be a good thing, but I am not fully convinced yet.

As an aside, my favourite ever mobile phone was this lovely Motorola Razr that cost me $1000 in Singapore in 2004 - hued from sheer metal rolled on the thighs of the gods and crushed to smithereens by the elephantine stomping of my baby son three years later :(  It warms me to note that Motorola still make the Razr, for all its faults, and I can see why people nowadays have similar aesthetic feelings about their iPhones.