2529: Mobile Phone Apathy

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I’ve always thought of myself as something of a gadget-head, but over the last few years I’ve become increasingly underwhelmed and bored with those most ubiquitous of devices, the mobile phone.

I remember getting my first mobile phone towards the end of my schooldays. It was a big fat Motorola thing with an extendable aerial, and I remember the most exciting thing about it was discovering that I could hold down a button to write lower-case letters in text messages, whereas I’d previously been writing in all-caps like a grandmother learning to use email for the first time. (We were all writing in all-caps like a grandmother learning to use email for the first time at the time.)

Every year or two after that, there was the excitement of The Upgrade. I upgraded from my Motorola to a Nokia 3210, which was exciting because it had Snake on it, and everyone loved Snake, despite it being something that I’d played some 15 years earlier on my old Atari 8-bit computers. Then I upgraded to a Nokia 3330, which had Snake II on it (which was essentially Snake with mildly better graphics). These two phones were pretty similar to one another, though this was also the age that phones were getting smaller rather than bigger, so the 3330 was pleasingly compact after the relatively bulky 3210.

After that, I went for a Sony Ericsson phone that had a colour screen and a camera. Well, I say it had a camera; actually, the camera was a separate unit you had to snap on to the bottom of it which took photos at approximately the size of a postage stamp that weren’t any use to anyone. The colour screen was nice, though.

After that, I got a phone whose make and model I can’t remember, but which I think was actually one of my favourite phones of all time. It had a pretty big screen — in colour again, a reasonable quality camera and, best of all, the ability to record sounds that could subsequently be used for ringtones, message tones, alarm tones and all manner of other things. It was a lot of fun, and an early phone to support Java, too, which meant you could download games for it. And there were some decent games available, too — most notably the excellent puzzle game Lumines, which had previously been something exclusive to PSP owners.

If I remember correctly, my next phone after that was the ill-fated Nokia N-Gage, which I picked up out of interest in its gaming capabilities. I actually ended up liking it as a phone more than a gaming device, since its vertically-oriented screen made a lot of games impractical and tricky to play, but the dedicated directional pad, the way you held it and the big, bright, clear screen made it a very comfortable personal organiser device. Sure, you looked dumb talking on it — it was notorious for its “side-talking” posture, whereby you looked like you were holding a taco up to your ear while talking on it — but I rarely talked on the phone anyway, so this simply wasn’t a big issue for me. It’s actually one of my most fondly remembered phones.

I forget if I had any other phones between the N-Gage and the iPhone that I was given for free while I worked at Apple — I was working retail during the launch of the device — but none spring to mind. The iPhone, meanwhile, was actually a little underwhelming when it first launched; while its bright display and capacitive touchscreen certainly looked lovely, iOS 1.X was severely limited in what you could actually do with it. About the most interesting thing you could do with a first-gen iPhone was browse the “full” Internet rather than only WAP-enabled mobile-specific pages. (Interestingly, with responsive sites, we’ve now actually gone back to having mobile-specific pages, albeit with a lot more functionality than old-school WAP sites.)

The iPhone was a bit of a watershed moment for mobile phones, though, because it’s at that point that devices stopped being quite so different and unique from one another. Each and every iPhone is much like the last — perhaps a little faster, a little bigger, a little clearer, a little more lacking connection ports we’ve previously taken for granted — and each and every Android phone is much like the last too, except, of course, for the ones that function as inadvertent incendiary devices.

I’ve had my HTC One M8 phone for over two years now. I picked it up as an upgrade from my crusty old iPhone 4 because I was bored with iOS and wanted to see what Android was like, and discovered that yes, I liked Android, though it’s just as boring as iOS is. Now, even as I’m eligible for an upgrade to the newest, latest and greatest, I have absolutely no desire to investigate my options whatsoever. The M8 works fine for what I use it for, and I find most new phones virtually indistinguishable from what the M8 offers. Again, they might be a little bit faster or offer a higher resolution screen — although at the size of a mobile phone, there comes a point where resolution becomes completely irrelevant, since individual pixels are too small to distinguish — but they don’t do anything new or exciting in the same way that my pre-smartphone upgrades offered.

Each and every upgrade before the iPhone I had was genuinely thrilling, and something I wanted to show off to people. Each phone was unique from the last, and each brand offered its own particular twist on things. Now, the actual devices themselves are uninteresting and virtually indistinguishable from one another; simply a delivery medium for their operating system of choice. And operating systems aren’t interesting.

I think a big part of my growing cynicism and apathy for this particular side of technology also comes from the fact that the mobile marketplace in general just feels a bit sleazy. Ever since the world was given in-app purchases — something which I knew would be a terrible idea as soon as it was announced — we’ve been subjected to revolting, exploitative free-to-play garbage, ad-infested messes and all manner of other bullshit. Rather than being the cool, exciting gadgets they once were, mobile phones feel increasingly like just another way for advertisers to invade your life and snake oil salesmen to part you with your case — although what part of life isn’t this way these days?

All this is a rather long-winded way of saying that I’m in no hurry to upgrade my HTC One M8, and in fact, I’ve considered on more than one occasion actually “downgrading” to a feature phone rather than a smartphone. Maybe I should see how much N-Gages are going for on eBay…

1542: Terebi Desu

Our new TV arrived today at some ungodly hour in the morning — which felt all the more ungodly for the fact that excellent Vita dungeon crawler Demon Gaze had kept me enraptured until 3am — and I’ve been having a bit of a play with it. (For the curious, it’s a Samsung Series 6 55-inch LED TV; it has a catchy three thousand-digit model number but I have no idea what it is.)

When Andie suggested we grab a new TV, I was a little concerned that it might not be a significant upgrade over what we already had — a 40-inch Samsung, albeit one that is now about four or five years old. After all, despite the fact that my previous TV was an end-of-line model when I bought it — making it much cheaper — it was pretty good. Three HDMI ports, built-in Freeview tuner, full 1080p support — it had pretty much everything I needed, though it would have been nice to have an optical output port. Everything I connected to it worked just fine, though, ranging from the PlayStation 2 through the SCART port (yummy, blurry standard-def picture) to the various games consoles and PC through the HDMI ports.

With the previous TV working just fine, why buy a new one, you might ask? Well, having spent this evening playing some Final Fantasy XIV on it and having watched some anime and TV on it earlier… yes, it was a good investment. The increase in size is extremely noticeable — it’s big enough to have a touch of “peripheral vision” now, giving a much more immersive feel to both video and games — and the LED screen is lovely, bright and clear. I have no idea if I’ve optimized its settings appropriately — I’ve put the PC input into Game mode, because prior to that there was noticeable input lag, but haven’t really fiddled with much else — but it certainly seems to look very nice, although as Andie pointed out, the bigger the screen you get, the more of a dog’s dinner standard-definition footage and TV broadcasts look. Oh well.

It’s a Smart TV, too, which means it has two remotes, one of which has a trackpad rather than, you know, just being normal, plus “apps” for doing shit old, dumb TVs don’t do. There’s stuff like BBC iPlayer and Netflix built into it, for example, and even apps for things like Spotify and the like. (There are also games to download, but somehow I don’t see them being particularly worthwhile, and as such I will be giving them a wide berth.) I’m not entirely convinced how much I will use the “smart” features over time, but it’s nice to have them there, I guess — not to mention the fact it is seemingly now impossible to buy a new TV that isn’t 1) “smart” and 2) 3D.

The 3D thing surprises me somewhat, I must confess. I thought 3D TV and gaming had been a colossal failure, and yet all the televisions we looked at over the weekend were 3D in one form or another. The TV we ended up getting is “active 3D”, which is supposedly better because you have to turn the glasses on before they work properly (and for some other reasons, too) and sure, it’s quite fun — we watched a couple of trailers in 3D earlier and it was quite cool — but it’s not something I can see myself using a lot of, and certainly not for protracted periods of time. It will almost certainly be something to show off to people who come and visit, but little else.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with it. It fits nicely on our TV stand and doesn’t look too big or too small, and it’s a noticeable upgrade over what we had before — plus the almost bezel-free design, with the picture going right the way to the edges of the front of the unit, looks absolutely smashing.

I’m sure I’ll be taking it for granted before long — and I’m not looking forward to moving it when our new house is sorted — but yes; I’m glad we got it. And now I’m off to bed because I’ve been staring at it all evening and I think my eyes could probably do with a rest!

#oneaday, Day 270: Go Go Gadget, uhh, Gadget

I love gadgets. Anyone who knows me in “real life” will not be surprised by this revelation. But I’m always impressed by quite how much we can do with various little portable implements these days. And even not quite so recently, too.

The most recent mind-blowing moment I had was during this last week when I had my little expedition to the woods. I was standing in the middle of a forest with absolutely no trace of civilisation except a little crude wooden bench by the side of the muddy path. And somehow I had better mobile signal than I do in the house I’m sitting right now. So, without thinking, I popped out my iPhone and fired up eBuddy to say hello to my buddy Chris in California. He responded back and we had a nice discussion about music.

Let’s just think about that a minute. I was in the middle of a wood in Cambridgeshire, England. Chris was somewhere in sunny California. And yet there we were, chatting away like this was a perfectly normal thing to do. That’s awesome.

One of my favourite gadget moments, though, was a good few years back now. I was up in Edinburgh at the Fringe with the Southampton University Theatre Group, or “Rattlesnake!” as we’d inexplicably decided to call ourselves. At the time, I had somehow managed to end up with the responsibility of keeping the Theatre Group website up to date. I’d prepared a special Edinburgh page and everything, and I decided that it would be pretty awesome to keep an online diary. The concept of “blogging” was but a pipe dream for all but the biggest nerds (even bigger than me) at this point. And doing so via a mobile device was absolutely out of the question.

I did, however, have my Palm Tungsten with me, to date my second-favourite gadget after my iPhone. You could play Shining Force on it, for heaven’s sake. That’s awesome, if beside the point. No, the reason my Palm came in handy was that I could type up my diary entries into the Notes application on it and then use the handily-provided SD card (32MB!) to transfer said material to a computer in the conveniently-located Internet café we found one day.

One may ask why I didn’t just type said diary entries straight into the computers. Well, the advantage of doing it on the Palm was that I could write things as they happened. I could write a rehearsal report. I could write what we were up to in the park. I could write about flyering the Royal Mile. The Frankenstein pub. (AMAZING) Being on top of Arthur’s Seat drinking sake as the sun rose. (DOUBLEPLUSAMAZING)

Sure, I could have written about these things after the fact. But the immediacy of being able to write about it there and then was pretty damn cool. Each new generation of gadgets makes this sort of thing easier and easier to do. And while it has its downsides—the sea of people filming concerts on their mobile phones instead of actually watching the damn things being one—on the whole I think it’s really great to be able to share life’s exciting little moments (or, in the case of some of you out there, the details of your latest bowel movements) with people that you care about it. Of course some of this is vanity. But the other side of it is being able to share things with people that you don’t get to hang out with as often as you like.

So gadgets are awesome. For everyone. Not just nerds.