New phone

I have a new phone; I know within a couple of weeks I’ll be so at ease using it that I won’t give it a second thought, and so used to the way it feels that it won’t seem strange at all. At the moment I feel like a granny with it, I peer at it to try and work out where the thing I want is, I miss the message tone and although I recognize the ring tone I forget how to find the way to answer it…

My first actual experience of a mobile phone was in 1992 when my cousin had one; the first time I actually saw one and was able to look at it properly and hold it was about three years later. The first mobile phone I had was in 1999, it was pale blue and it was a Nokia… the phone I have now, about five phones later, maybe six, is another Nokia and it’s red.

How amazed my grandparents would be; my father’s parents had a pub so I guess there might have been a phone there, my mother’s parents lived in rented accommodation and I am sure they didn’t have a telephone at all. Any calls would have to be made from a public phone box… and thinking about it, we didn’t have a telephone until the late 60’s, before then we had to use a phone box. Telephones were just not part of ordinary people’s lives then. The idea of spending hours on a phone chatting would have been a mystery I imagine… as for the idea of having a phone not much bigger than a cigarette packet which could be carried in your pocket, and which could take photos and show pictures… well that would have been the sort of thing you might see in unrealistic science fiction films!

No doubt in ten, twenty, fifty years time, our present phones will seem primitive and unwieldy, but like my grandparents, I can’t imagine what changes we might see in the future of phone technology!