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Technologies converging into the mobile phone

Stuart Jeffries

Watches are on the way out. The days of the diary are numbered. And cameras could be next.

THERE WILL come a moment in about seven years' time when I will make a fool of myself in front of my daughter. Surely it won't take that long, you say. Be quiet. It will happen like this. One summer's evening, she will be playing in the street with a bunch of other eight-year-olds and I will go out to call her in for tea. Thanks to the hovercars, free-floating teleportation platforms, jetpack-powered flying ice-cream sellers, and other inventions that I confidently predict will be filling our skies come 2014, the noise will be so oppressive that I won't be able to make myself understood with words alone. So I will be forced to make a simple gesture to tell her it's time to come inside.

What will it be? I will tap my wrist where a watch should be. The time-honoured sign that you should wrap up one activity and prepare for another. One problem: it won't work. Not in 2014. She won't know what I'm on about. She will look at me blankly with that soul-destroying gaze that children are hard-wired to give their parents.

Why? Because few people will wear watches in the near future. Wrist-borne chronometers are so last millennium. In the U.S., a survey found that nearly two-thirds of teens never wear a watch and that only one in 10 wears one every day.

True, wrist-borne time devices continue to appeal to deeply inadequate men with high disposable incomes. But let's not allow the dreary fetishes of GQ's target audience to spoil the story. Today a watch is the opposite of a status symbol. Indeed, the main reason I'm writing this piece is that I was spotted by an editor wearing a loser watch. It is a Lorus Sports, quite possibly purchased more than 10 years ago from a market in north London, and on its third rotting leather strap. It smells like feet.

All-in-one

Increasingly, all the stuff you need to get through the day is focussed in one piece of kit. Thanks to what manufacturers like to call "convergence," today's mobiles already allow you to tell the time, arrange your appointments diary, watch films, play games, and take pictures of your blocked sink that you can send as jpegs to your plumber, who will text you back a ludicrous estimate, which you can check by using your phone's calculator function.

It can only be a matter of time before your mobile will allow you to operate the garage door, unlock the car, swipe your way into the office, bus, tube or nightclub. Already, the better type of phone can teach you to play the guitar, the screen showing finger positions for chords and the speakers telling you what they should sound like.

Mobiles have become so much the focus of consumer technology that you might as well drop not just your watch, but your iPod, DVD camera, digital camera, calculator, alarm clock, diary, address book, and PlayStation in the canal and go out with one sleek piece of kit. One problem: you'll get mugged for your high-spec ponce-a-phone as soon as you pull it out of your trousers in public. The omnicompetent mobile is a terrible thing. As H.L. Mencken put it: "For every complex problem, there is a simple solution ... and it is wrong."

Technology evolves irrespective of our desires. Its onward march leaves us in the lurch, haunted by memories of things we used to do. "Technology changes what is socially acceptable all the time by pushing boundaries," says Tom Dunmore of magazine. "In terms of people talking into their mobiles, that's become much more acceptable socially." Maybe in your world, Mr. Dunmore. "What amazes me now," he says, "is how you see teenagers on trains using their mobiles like speakers, holding them up and playing music." It is a confusing development: the very point, I thought, of personal stereos, MP3 players, Discmans and the rest was that they kept the sound, for the most part, in the user's head. Technology takes us in socially discomfiting, unpredictable areas.

For example, keyboards and computer mice (mouses?) will soon no longer be at the cutting edge of technology. Which is a shame for those of us who have only just got used to them. As a result, people will laugh at you if you make those spider moves with your fingers to signify typing, because in the future (according to Jobs), touch-sensitive screens will render keyboards obsolete. And that's before we even get on to voice recognition. Our typing days may be numbered.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

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