I GOT BILLS I GOTTA PAY [517]

The personal computer was our first portal to cyberspace, but the smartphone is the yoke that made us denizens of an extended reality, and regardless of how involved we become, our connection to that reality requires upkeep, trade-ups and trade-offs.

My first mobile phone, bought in 2000, was bought for under £100, was topped up with pre-paid cards, and replaced my using public phone boxes. Phone number thirteen, also my ninth smartphone and sixth iPhone, is a portable computer plied with cameras, sensors and antennas and, fitting for its having replaced the local branch of my bank, it is financed through a two-year contract with a credit agreement and monthly payments, rolling the trade-in payment for my previous phone into paying off the next contract, all for a device that needs to be continuously on the verge of being replaced for the business model that drives their ownership to continue.

Fortunately for Apple, and my service provider, I wanted to replace my phone: both it and its contract were three years old, and I had become thoroughly sick with both through overfamiliarity and a depleted battery. I am sure most owners of the iPhone 17, me included, did not pay £/$/€799 for one upfront, or ever contemplated doing so - the objective is squaring monthly costs with noticeable improvement over the previous phone.

It’s almost like becoming tethered to your smartphone, if not becoming addicted to using it, is required to justify the expense, and more reasons for that tethering need to be created to make such a device indispensable, from managing home heating and electrical items through to unlocking doors and starting cars - generative A.I. features are one more symptom of the need to progress.

Fortunately for me, and despite increases in processing power, storage capacity and camera ability becoming more incremental with each model, but the lavender-coloured iPhone 17 I now own is more enticingly tactile than ever. The device’s edges are more rounded than the iPhone 14 Pro it replaces, making it easier to hold for longer, while the extra “Camera Control” finally gives me a proper shutter button. I have selected the “Action Button” to seek out titles of songs amongst ambient noise via Shazam, prioritising a feature I often use that was buried in an app or menu.

But this is Apple’s problem: in their eyes, I have downgraded, from a Pro-level iPhone to a regular one, but the improvements they made across all their phones in three years, from screen resolution and refresh speed to camera sensors and battery capacity, means enough of a difference is still being made to my experience of using the device - but seriously, one-touch Shazam is the game-changer for me here, with everything else working that bit more quickly and snappily.

Most importantly for me, the three-year contract I saddled myself with to use a Pro-level phone - trading in at the end of the contract makes it hard to say I truly owned it - was less preferable to only needing a two- year contract for something just as good. Perhaps this defines my monetary limits, but also those of the phone I need - I am not missing anything, even after turning off all A.I. features, and doing that may have extended the life of the battery even further.

I have no remedy for anything I have talked about - it is the framework we have collectively agreed on to provide a creeping necessity in our lives, and so long as it has something to offer us, we will keep it going.

COME ON BEFORE WE CRACK [450]

“Put on the corned beef hash” is a well-known misheard lyric from Kenny Loggins’s song “Footloose”, as I discovered when I misheard it myself being played on a speaker at a food festival.

I immediately wanted to check the correct lyric, but I could not get a signal on my smartphone to check. I am very used to the impulse of checking what I don’t know with my phone, so when I couldn’t, that impulse had to be used up a different way, so I checked how many steps I walked so far – that was something the phone could count by itself.

This was the point I realised I had the perfect opening to an article about smartphones, so I opened my note-taking app to make an early start.

I have previously talked about Marshall McLuhan’s delineation of media as being “hot” or “cool” in terms of how demanding they are of their user’s attention, with television being defined as “cool” because of its lower fidelity picture and sound relative to the real world, and it having to compete for attention in the settings they are usually found.

However, is the smartphone a “medium”, or a Swiss Army knife-type delivery system for many different media? Does the device demand my attention, or the combination of all the things it can do?

Having explained the delineation of hot and cool media in his 1964 book “Understanding Media” subtitled “The Extensions of Man”, McLuhan looks at many different media to determine where they stand, and what their true message is, for example the telephone removing walls and distance from human conversation.

It is entirely possible for me to create a table from the different media McLuhan discusses, taking an average of whether the smartphone is overall “hot” or “cold”. My phone is expected to reproduce both the spoken word, through radio and recorded music, and the written word, simulating print media from newspapers and magazines to comic books and various forms. It is expected to make photographs and act as their frame. It is a telegraph, through telephony, various messaging apps and in submitting information to the internet and recalling from it. It displays various advertisements. It is my television. It is my typewriter. It can be used to light up a room. I could also throw it... but I need it so much I fear breaking it.

However, the smartphone leaves me “cold”, as it were, because it relies entirely on my attention. It may be one step on from having separate devices for each of its individual uses, but it takes you one step away from the advantages those devices had: larger screens and surfaces, better sound systems, better microphones, brighter light, and so on. I have to bring more to my smartphone to make it work the way I need it to work, which may require me to compromise to bridge the gap created by the loss of fidelity that I could have achieved with a proper camera, a book, a pen, a Blu-ray player, a torch and so on. The smartphone is a new level of compromise.

IF YOU DON’T ANSWER, I’LL JUST RING IT OFF THE WALL [136]

There appears not to have been a time before the mobile phone or, if there was, it exists in an alternative reality, one where Biff Tannen did not turn the Hill Valley courthouse into a casino. More seriously, the mobile phone has changed how we live, changed our habits, and changed our infrastructure. Like with the World Wide Web, I will be one of the last, at age thirty-five, to remember a time without them.

I had to remind myself of how I used to keep in touch – I actually remember once having to wait until somebody finished using a payphone before I could make my own call, using my pre-paid BT Phonecard. That all changed in 2000 when, ahead of my seventeenth birthday, I bought my first mobile phone, just as they started becoming affordable to everyone. By that year, just over half of UK adults had one.

I’m not sure why I bought the phone I did, but I guess I recognised the name “Philips” more than “Nokia,” who made the phones everyone else had at the time. The Philips Savvy was introduced in 1999, and was a chunky black and blue brick of a basic phone. Its big buttons make it clear it has only one use – cameras were not commonplace on phones for another five years.

If I wasn’t using it to call or send an SMS message – the manual confirms SMS stands for “Short Message Service” - the other reason I had the Savvy in my hand was to unscrew and screw in its external aerial, as a way of keeping your hands busy. Unlike the black slate smartphones for today, if I broke the aerial, I could just buy a new one, and I could replace the battery with a new one, or one I charged earlier, or one with a bigger capacity, which needed its own bigger back cover. Standby time was measured in days, but you could only do so much with the Savvy.

With no information available on internal storage capacity, saving contacts, SMS messages and call history appears to be down to the SIM card only. Details of the last twenty calls you made, and the last ten you received, is the most you can have. No internet service is possible, but you do get a calculator and stopwatch. The LCD screen had space for two lines of text and an icon – the home screen displayed the time using a clock face. There is a primitive pre-emoji list of twenty-five characters you can send with SMS messages, but only an emoticon is sent if the recipient doesn’t have the same phone as you. Short pre-prepared SMS messages are provided, like “please call me back, or “I will be late” – the first such message had only been sent in 1992, over the Vodafone network, and people were not expected to take time writing long messages. The only other “app” was a “biorhythm calendar,” using your birthday and a given date to show your results for Chance, Love, Energy and Success. Amuse your friends, if you can.

In the year 2000 alone, payphone use declined by 12% in the UK – BT responded by increasing the minimum call charge for the first time since 1984, from 10p to 20p, and began charging for directory enquiry calls. BT Phonecards were withdrawn in 2002, except within the prison service. From the peak of 92,000 phone boxes in 1992, there are now only 40,000 on UK streets, with BT expecting to halve that total by 2022.

For all its limitations, I used my Philips Savvy for four years, longer than any other phone I had since. I finally joined the Nokia brigade in 2004 with a 3510i, an updated version of one of the first phones to have a colour screen, and 2007 established the two-year contract pattern to which practically everyone follows. Today, speaking as the owner of a phone that insists on using glass, it would be nice to use a phone I can drop, or throw, with abandon.