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Posts Tagged ‘ mobile phones ’
Mobile phones: 15 years and a world apart
Friday, December 2nd, 2011
Fifteen years ago – almost to the day – I got my first mobile phone, a Motorola mr20. It was a chunky thing, with a two-line black-on-green LCD display and a battery that lasted for up to 12 hours (so long as you didn’t use it to make calls or try out any of its three different ringtones). It could receive text messages, but not send them: for that you needed the upmarket mr30 model.
Today, a decade and a half later, I’ve taken delivery of a Samsung Galaxy S II. If ever you wanted an illustration of the phenomenal pace at which technology advances, here it is. In what seems like an alarmingly short time, we’ve progressed from that rudimentary brick to a slim, slate-style affair with a vibrant full-colour touchscreen, a feature list as long as your arm, 16GB of internal storage and, well, slightly better battery life.
Consider that voice calls are now just a small part of a smartphone’s job and you could question whether the two phones are even really the same sort of device. (more…)
Tags: internet, mobile, mobile phones, O2, Orange, smartphones, sms, tariff
Posted in: Hardware
Privacy, mobiles and my nan
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
My nan hated mobile phones. Just taking one into her living room was enough to invite her rambling wrath, invetiably finished off with being called love in a tone that was more hand grenade than full stop.
In my nan’s mind a mobile phone was basically a cancer wand, the merest waft of which could kill a man stone dead. If she was feeling particularly vitriolic on the subject, she would then claim Doris next-door (which I genuinely believed was her full name until I was twelve or so) knew somebody who’d gone deaf using one, before delivering the coup de grace – a stunning exposition on how my mobile phone was pretty much everything that was wrong with the modern world, bar Genocide and Carrot and Coriander soup.
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