What would you like to find in your stocking this Christmas? A brand new, state-of-the-art picture messaging mobile phone?
Sir Christopher Gent, CEO of Vodaphone, desperately hopes so. The bubble may have long since burst but that hasn't stopped manufacturers from putting all their hopes into the next big thing: phones that can be turned into cameras. And the good news doesn't stop there. Beyond taking and transmitting pictures, these mini wonders are also old-fashioned dictation machines and pocket PCs with calendars, contact lists and all the rest. They are games consoles. They can do e-mails, access the web, and let you make calls at the same time. And all this can be yours for a mere £180 and up.
Gent and the rest of the industry are pinning their hopes on this new generation of mobiles because Vodaphone and its rivals are floating on a sea of debt. Over the last year sales of phones which merely allow for talk and text messaging have slumped alarmingly. How could it be otherwise? 70 per cent of us in the UK already have one and the suspicion must be that the remaining 30 per cent are resolute non-users. It is therefore crucial that we start throwing these fossils away. To make sure we do, Vodaphone are spending £158m to advertise their new services, while Orange are forking out more than £13m advertising the wonders of their SPV (for sound, pictures, video) 'Smartphone'.
There's a lot at stake in these campaigns. The companies incurred their debt buying grossly over-priced licences from governments to let them build the new infrastructure, due to be rolled out next year, which would allow them to offer more advanced services. The industry, gripped as it is by a profound faith in the attraction of new gizmos, sees picture-messaging and advanced web access as the answer to all its problems. In Japan, Vodaphone has already noted that photo-messaging subscribers spend around 20 per cent more with the company than do ordinary mobile users. How can the rest of us resist?
Given that images over the phone were first introduced in 1927 but went nowhere, the answer has to be that we will probably resist it rather well. In that year, Dr. Herbert Ives, head of the television research team at the Bell Labs introduced a videophone with a 2" x 2.5" screen with an (extremely) low definition image of 72 lines. By 1929 Ives had produced a colour version and a videophone circuit was installed in Manhattan. In 1938 the Germans linked Berlin and Nuremberg using phones which produced a 180-line picture. After World War II, at various times videophone gadgets attached to conventional phone wires were offered to an uninterested public. And now we are being tempted yet again.
The question of the success or failure of any given technology is never actually a matter of machines alone. Today's mobile phone is essentially a two-way radio, a device dating from 1906, made possible by digital signal processing, a technique first demonstrated in 1938. Diffusing this technology, as is always the case, has depended at least as much, on social factors as on technological capabilities. The current talk-and-text mobile phone 'fits' the way we live now. It allows us flexibility in making social and business arrangements. It permits ever-greater exploitation of our labour. It enables us to monitor the kids. It gets the teenagers off the home phone. And, if we live in a country unsaturated by conventional telephones, it provides the means of leaping a whole generation of landline networking. "Hello, I'm on the train," is not an infuriatingly redundant communication but a genuine expression of how well mobiles mesh with our lifestyles. That's why by the turn of the century, worldwide, there were already over 470 million of them.
Dr Ives was asked by a visitor in 1931 whether he thought the videophone had a future. He admitted "frankly that he has not the remotest idea whether the public want to see the fellow at the other end of the telephone line badly enough to pay a high price for the privilege." In the event, we the public did not and, probably, still don't. "Hallo, I'm still in the office .What did you say?.. You can see a barmaid behind me? .." (My daughter pointed out to me that you couldn't use the facility to call the boy friend unless you had your make-up on.) Private corporate video conferencing systems have not stopped people travelling to meetings, because teleconferencing tends to avoid making really contentious decisions. For serious business, we humans need to speak face to face. Anyway, how much of an ordeal is it to abandon the office to take a trip?
Picture-messaging simply doesn't 'fit'. The only people in our culture who take photographs all the time are professional photographers or amateurs of a peculiarly obsessive kind. The only spheres which demand instant transmission of pictures are journalism, certain sorts of 'distributed' film production (where images are electronically transmitted from location to editing facility), or highly specialised uses within tele-medicine. Why would the rest of us need this capacity? Instead of the postcard of the holiday hotel with the biro-ed 'X' indicating your room, you can send loved ones back home instant 'wish you were here' images. Absent family can get little Janice blowing out her birthday candles within seconds of her doing it. (Of course, if they are really absent in Australia or America, they might well be asleep.) Teenagers can flash each other images of their dirty bits. But even these minor excitements seem short-lived. While Vodaphone points to its 20 per cent increase in revenues, a Japanese survey found that only one in three camera/phone owners ever use the facility and even that third give up sending pictures within the year.
As with pictures, so with the other extra services. The hand-holdable camera-telephone-games console-recording-computer might be a wonder but it is essentially redundant since all its functions, already exist in other handy, widely-used forms. Being a little phone adds nothing but portability to the laptop and palm computer (both capable of playing games). And even the miniature size is not an obvious advantage.
Texting, like the QWERTY keyboard, may well suggest there is no limit to the human capacity to overcome inappropriately designed features. Nevertheless the lack of alphanumeric keyboard and a minuscule 12 line x 30 character phone screen cannot match the ergonomics of the discrete machines. (The new phones do not have the touch-screens and styluses of the pocket PCs.)
Moreover, despite the enthusiasm of the technophiles, putting disparate functions together doesn't necessarily attract buyers. We still insist on acquiring separate televisions and video/DV machines, for example, when common sense suggests they should be together in one box. Given the different circumstances in which we use the various facilities the new phones offer, what's the real advantage in having all these together in one package, however small?
New technologies appear in our lives for a variety of reasons. Some are grounded in the needs of those selling the technology. Others are smart technological responses to what we the public need. In the nature of the case, these advances, being based on social demand, 'fit'. This is by no means the case if engineering or entrepreneurship is the driver. Being able to rearrange the TV schedule, for example, ensured that the comparatively unsung home VCR achieved a penetration rate greater than that of almost any other recent technology including the much-hyped home computer. We needed VCRs. They 'fitted'. On the other hand, the only people who needed 16rpm records or Polaroid instant movie film, to take two random examples, were the manufacturers. We left them twisting in the wind.
Of course, the new phones might not turn out this way. But it does seem likely that we won't need a camera-telephone-games console-recording-computer just yet for all that Sir Christopher, his share-holders and rivals might desperately want us to have one. In fact, bet you that if there is a camera/phone in your life, you won't be sending pictures with it this time next year. You'll have nobody to transmit to, for one thing.
