I'M ON THE PHONE

Dick Pountain/11 January 2007/10:33/Idealog 150

I'm not normally a superstitious person but sometimes - as now - the omens and portents pile up too high to ignore. Last Sunday I was in Camden Market browsing a stall I know that sells African artefacts, and I bought a beautiful Masai club or knobkerrie made of ebony, as elegant as a Brancusi sculpture. The very next night on BBC News 24 they were having a 'geek week' in which one of their reporters travelled around Kenya reporting on the impact the mobile phone is having in Africa, which he explained in quite apocalyptic terms.

It seems the mobile phone has caught on in Africa in a quite extraordinary way, so that even people on very low incomes will sacrifice to get one. A large part of the reason is that the mobile provides a way of completely leapfrogging the corrupt layer of middle-men and bureaucrats who leech on the economy and hinder progress. Interviewee after interviewee described how they'd started a successful business by working directly with their remote customers over their mobile. For example a coffee farmer - standing among his trees in best BBC "look-we're-on-location" style - was on his mobo to a buyer in Nairobi to monitor prices hour by hour. The implication was that telecomms technology may allow Africa, and other developing nations, to completely skip over a whole stage of infrastructure development, the stage at which the kleptocrats embezzle the aid funds that should have been used to build roads and railways. I have my doubts about that: you can certainly get a coffee price over the phone, but you can't deliver the beans that way.

Anyway, our reporter next asked a local pundit whether there's anywhere in Kenya without mobile coverage, and she suggested perhaps the Great Rift Valley. So off he trotted over the dusty plain, just like a Land Rover advert, and arrived among a picturesque group of Masai cattle herders in traditional dress (though regrettably without any clubs visible). He asked a magnificent matriarch if they could get a mobile signal there and she said of course we can, and snapped her fingers for the mobile from one of her attendants (or sons?) "How many Masai in your village own mobiles?", he asked. Around one in three was her estimate. She found it absolutely invaluable for keeping in touch with the herders and knowing that her cattle were safe. Did she think it would change their way of life? Oh no, they would continue to live by their cattle and their traditions - the mobile just made it easier and safer. A far sounder lesson in the rational appraisal of technology impact there.

Only a day or two later, Apple not only released some positively pornographic details about its stunningly beautiful iPhone, but announced that it was dropping the "Computer" from its name, to become simply "Apple Inc." from now on. Are you starting to get the feeling that we've just hopped eras yet? I've even entered this new era myself by finally getting off the fence to try out a Palm Treo 680, with wholly satisfactory results so far.

I'll admit that I grumped about Palm in a recent column, but in my defence the few millimetres they've shaved off the 680 (and the loss of that unsightly aerial stub) make it look altogether less offensive, and rather more importantly it works very well indeed. I recently lost my Sony Clie and the Treo has seamlessly replaced it, running all the same Palm apps perfectly, including the Bonsai outliner, TealScript for full-screen Graffiti, my TrueTerm Italian dictionaries and the Concise Oxford. Most important of all, because of PalmOS and the tiny but excellent QWERTY keyboard I can actually use it, unlike ordinary mobiles whose ghastly interfaces push me to the brink of apoplexy. The only downside is getting used to feeble battery life and the mobo-user's daily ritual of charging it.

I'm finally starting to believe that the tension that currently exists between the computing and telecomms worlds really might eventually be resolved in favour of phone technology, rather than by full convergence. It's far from impossible to imagine the PC shrinking to become just a box on the wall, not unlike an electricity meter or a broadband router, with all user interaction taking place through a handheld device that communicates with it via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and isn't constrained to run any desktop operating system. That's what makes the current moves at Apple so important - since the astounding success of the iPod, Apple has moved into the position of chief arbiter of interface standards, with far more credibility than Microsoft. We merely suffer whatever Microsoft imposes on us, whereas we queue round the block to get at whatever Apple offers (or rather people 30 years younger than me do).

If Apple could convert even half of its 60million+ iPod owners to using its phone, then perhaps we'll finally see smartphones completely replace the grotesque mobile phone interface, and my faith in the basic intelligence of Homo sapiens will be fully restored. And maybe mobiles really will turn out to be - as those African enthusiasts suggest - useful tools for reorganising the real world, rather than merely gateways into a Second Life as the PC threatens to become.

MY FIRST PC
After a borrowed Commodore 4K PET, my first proper PC was a Sharp MZ-80B with twin 5.25" floppy drives running CP/M. I used it to learn Forth, Pascal and Z80 assembler, wrote my own comms program, and even wrote a hack to access its black-and-green bitmapped graphics from within CP/M. I wrote my first book on it too, in Wordstar.