ComEnts

I got myself a new phone at the weekend. Sony Ericcson K800i (which seems to be the one just about everyone has these days) and it got me thinking.

The modern mobile phone is a pretty amazing bit of technology. It's a still and video camera, music player, telephone, video phone, games machine, web browser, personal organiser, address book and alarm clock all rolled into one. We tend to take them a bit for granted these days but mobile phones have only been really common for less than 10 years. I got my first phone about 8 years ago I guess. It was pretty simple, you could store phone numbers, make phone calls and send text messages.

I remember reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (-NERD!) around that time and one of the futuristic gadgets the Mars colonists had access too were hand held communications and information devices. They could make video calls on them, access the main information networks and various other things, but they still didn't have the depth of features that modern phones have. The line between modern phones, PDAs and even PCs is becoming more blurred. The worlds biggest technology fair, Cebit in Hanover, is going to really focus strongly on mini handheld PCs. With Wi-Fi becoming more and more widespread and VOIP (basically using the internet to make phone calls) now in the mainstream it could be that our mobile phones of the future are basically internet enabled mini-PCs. I've got no idea really. I never would have predicted we'd get to where we are today this fast so who knows what we'll manage to do in the next 10 years.