I'll Give You a Bell : 20 Years of the Mobile Phone

"In just two decades, the mobile phone has become the fastest-selling, most loved - and hated - consumer product. Britain is the world's most mature mobile market, with more mobiles per head of population and higher bills than any other country. Almost all adults now have at least one mobile phone, one in two teenagers has a 'moby' and a new British firm, Communic8, has just launched MyMo, a simple phone for four- to eight-year-olds. Some 23 billion texts have been sent this year and more than 20 billion calls made. The total value of this electronic white noise is £15 billion....

Perhaps the biggest change mobiles have wrought is in the language of communication we all use. Textsperanto - the amalgam of abbreviated words, acronyms and coded punctuation that teenagers developed so that they can fit more words into their space-limited SMS messages - was designed to be impenetrable to adults but most of us have a grasp of it now. When a pupil at a Scottish secondary school handed in an essay entirely written 'in txt', her teacher gave her a 'C+ 4 e4t'....

For the refuseniks, however, the battle against the tiny power tools is about to get a lot tougher. Twenty years after Ernie Wise first pressed the green 'call send' button on a brick-sized Motorola handset, the latest tiny, third-generation - 3G - phones are about to hit the market. Today, thousands of teenagers and adults are poring over geeky phone manuals, configuring their new handsets so that they can surf the internet, download real-time TV and video clips, take photographs, make video calls and play MP3 music files." [The Guardian, via textually.org]

I had to call Sprint today to find out why I haven't been able to access any data services at home on my Treo for the last 10 days or so. The new recording that you hear - first thing - is a message noting that activations may take up to 24 hours because so many people are revving up their new phones.

I find the following overheard conversation to be pretty typical:

"College Girl: Yeah, I called mom and dad and left a message on their machine. I've been calling their cell phones too but they never pick up. They just don't understand. (pause....) Yeah, they don't get it -- cell phones are supposed to be carried around with them." [CamWorld]