Tablets, smartphones... whatever next?

What with all the the hype about tablets and the latest smartphones, sometimes I like to take a good hard look at where all this came from, and where we are going with it.


In the 1980's, one look at Lethal Weapon and you see a carphone the size of a brief case. 

In the early to mid nineties, my Dad got a GSM mobile phone, the thing was a brick by today's standards, but good grief we all thought it was small.  Not that he ever used it, given the fact that tariffs were very expensive back then, it became an expensive mantlepiece ornament that beeped occasionally.

For the first 2 years at University in '97 and '98, nobody had a mobile phone; then suddenly a few first years would have them, then a few of my friends, and then finally, I got a hand me down from my younger brother. It was like a disease spreading throughout the populace.

We didn't use them a great deal, costs were high, and texting was a bit of an ordeal on the early phones, and I'd say it wasn't until the Nokia 3210 came about that things got decidely easier (and we all played snake).

But we still met in the flesh, and arrange to go places when we were all togther, the phones were for finding out why you were late.

I guess it was from about 2001 that people started to use their phones more and more, and face to face contact with people seemed to me to get less and less.  By the middle of the noughties, the text message was a ubiquitous form of communication that started its own language (some of which still baffles me), and now people have web phones with integrated widgets to organise their life on Facebook.

The pace of change has been huge, can you imagine putting a teenager of today back in the 80's and seeing how they would cope?  One of my relations is a teenager and she spends most of her time focusing her eyes six inches from her face, this can't be good, unless you work for Specsavers.  What really scares me is she thinks she "knows" people from her conversations with them on Facebook, without having actually met them.


To me, this is bonkers.  I mean, if you share your profile with everyone, you might as well stick it on a sandwich board and parade the streets with it and start chatting with strangers.  Call me traditional, but when I grew up, we didn't talk talk to strangers, and yet the youth of today do so on a daily basis, often without their parents knowing about it.

Are we going to end up with a generation of people who can only communicate via Facebook?  Will they even know how to host a dinner party?  Will they just sit in stunned silence when they don't have their phone on them, and they actually have to talk with people? It's a poser for sure.

As for having 300 "friends", well, it's been proven that you can't really "know" more than about 150 people in your social circle, and you'll only really spend time talking to about 8 of them on a day to day basis.  But it's almost a competition to some people.  What happens when you just don't talk to people any more?  In the old days, you'd just stop writing and calling, but now they're stuck there in Facebook limbo, mere noise on your news feed until you de-friend them (shock horror)!

So what do these tablets bring to the discussion.  Personally, I don't see it for consumers, a laptop will do the job just as well, and maybe better for half the price, maybe it's useful for TV presenters or doctors in a hospital to cut down on the paperwork, but for you and I, I have yet to see the benefit.  That's not to say I don't like them, I've seen the iPad and it's a truly impressive piece of kit, but I don't particularly see a need for it, unless you like playing Angry Birds on a 9 inch screen.

When you stop to think about how often you change your phone, or upgrade your computer, it does boggle the mind the amount of money and resources we expend just to get the latest thing, this just adds one more gadget to be upgraded (who wants an iPad 1 when the iPad 2 comes out in a month or so?).

So what comes next?  Wearable phones?  Computerised jumpers that have your Facebook feed on the front of them, with snazzy solar powered trousers to charge it up?  Personally, I hope it's a bubble that'll burst, and that today's teenagers will realise that actually going and seeing your friends and enjoying yourself down the pub or going out for dinner with them is more enjoyable and more social than any social network.