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…)

Android App of the Week: Handcent SMS

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

If you’re a keen texter, then you’ll be well aware of the limitations of Android’s default messaging application: it’s basic, ugly and offers few options for those who like to tinker. This week’s Android App of the Week, Handcent SMS, is the perfect remedy for those who want more control over their messages.

For starters, Handcent does away with the default status-bar notification, replacing it with a neat popup that displays the message, its sender and a quick reply box along with some basic options. It’s a far neater way of dealing with a text than having to navigate into the app itself.

Handcent also includes a smart widget that, predictably, improves upon the awkward Rolodex-style tool included by HTC. It takes up half a screen when placed on my Hero’s desktop – rather than the whole screen used by the  HTC widget – and displays your last 20 texts along with a picture of the sender. Tap this and you can reply to or delete the particular message, or compose a new one.

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Bouncing messages off the moon

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Radio nerds celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings this week by bouncing radio waves off the moon. It’s a five second round-trip, even for a radio wave, so the conversations were rather stilted. But what an interesting tribute it was.

Will other technological milestones be celebrated in similar ways, I wonder?

Will the 40th anniversary of the internet’s creation be honoured by people bouncing emails off of Tim Berners-Lee’s laptop? Will we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the GSM network by routing SMS messages through Friedhelm Hillebrand’s mobile?

No, probably not.