Disrupting a class with your cell phone: three classic strategies
0 Comments Published by bill hilton on Sunday, September 03, 2006 at 10:42 PM.
Anyone under the age of 14 will tell you that the a cell phone is an ideal tool for causing mayhem in the classroom. That's why the damn things were invented. If people wanted a piece of mobile technology just to communicate with one another we'd still be using paper cups and very long pieces of string.
If you know any little kids, here are three tips to pass on to them before school starts - each guaranteed to give teachers' blood the kind of pressure you usually only find in Space Shuttle fuel pumps:
1. First one comes courtesy of Nokia, the first mobile provider (I think) to include calculator modes in their cell phones. In the middle of a lesson, get your phone out and start messing around with it. When your teacher tells you to put it away, say 'but I'm using it as a calculator!' in a bright and helpful voice. Do this even if you're in a history or religious studies lesson. In fact, especially then.
2. In a quiet moment, whip out your cell phone and start flicking through the media gallery. Announce you have a picture of your girlfriend naked and invite the teacher to look at it. Watch his facial expression flit from anger to shock, to prurient interest, to frustrated lust, to shame and then back to anger again, all in the space of about two seconds. If your phone is a Nokia N90 - or any other model with a twist-and-shoot architecture - spin the screen round to face the teacher and say 'I'm bringing it up.....now'. Watch him dive.
3. The greatest gag of all uses a much-overlooked piece of cell phone technology: the voice recorder. Wait until your teacher gets mad, or, even better, provoke him in some way. When he reaches the peak of rage flip on the recorder. Hopefully you'll pick up some slander or obscenity. When he's calmed down, play the recording back at full volume. Put on a serious expression and warn him you're also going to play it to your parents and and to senior staff members. Sit back and enjoy as he spends the rest of the lesson pleading for his career.
Ha, ha ha, all jolly good fun. Please don't actually do any of the above, and if you do, don't tell them it was me that told you.
If you know any little kids, here are three tips to pass on to them before school starts - each guaranteed to give teachers' blood the kind of pressure you usually only find in Space Shuttle fuel pumps:
1. First one comes courtesy of Nokia, the first mobile provider (I think) to include calculator modes in their cell phones. In the middle of a lesson, get your phone out and start messing around with it. When your teacher tells you to put it away, say 'but I'm using it as a calculator!' in a bright and helpful voice. Do this even if you're in a history or religious studies lesson. In fact, especially then.
2. In a quiet moment, whip out your cell phone and start flicking through the media gallery. Announce you have a picture of your girlfriend naked and invite the teacher to look at it. Watch his facial expression flit from anger to shock, to prurient interest, to frustrated lust, to shame and then back to anger again, all in the space of about two seconds. If your phone is a Nokia N90 - or any other model with a twist-and-shoot architecture - spin the screen round to face the teacher and say 'I'm bringing it up.....now'. Watch him dive.
3. The greatest gag of all uses a much-overlooked piece of cell phone technology: the voice recorder. Wait until your teacher gets mad, or, even better, provoke him in some way. When he reaches the peak of rage flip on the recorder. Hopefully you'll pick up some slander or obscenity. When he's calmed down, play the recording back at full volume. Put on a serious expression and warn him you're also going to play it to your parents and and to senior staff members. Sit back and enjoy as he spends the rest of the lesson pleading for his career.
Ha, ha ha, all jolly good fun. Please don't actually do any of the above, and if you do, don't tell them it was me that told you.
New Samsung Ultra Editions: a little bit of ooh-la-la
0 Comments Published by bill hilton on at 12:08 PM.
Samsung held the European product launches for the new 3G phones in their Ultra Edition range last week. These are basically riffs on the 'so slim it bends' design of the Ultra Edition phones the company launched back at the start of this year, though none is as spectacularly skinny as the X820s, which at 6.9mm thickness, ain't going to be beat for quite some time.
The Z720 (13.8mm) is positively chubby compared to its slightly older cousin, but it remains the thinnest HSDPA slide-up cell phone on the market. The Z370 and Z260 are a bit narrower, using Samsung's advanced materials science to make them thin but strong.
So much for the detail. What's really interesting is the place they chose for the product launch: the Louvre, Paris. Launch location is the sort of thing that brand managers lie awake all night thinking about. So what does this choice tell us about the way Samsung wants us to view its new mobiles?
Well, before the French Revolution the Louvre was a royal palace - but presumably the Korean guys don't want us to associate their technology with an old, decadent, inefficient, despotic, uncaring organisation staffed by bewigged, puffy-faced autocrats. These days the Louvre is an art gallery containing famous pieces such as the Mona Lisa, so it's more likely they want us to consider the Ultra Edition phones as works of art, instant design classics that will live in our collective imagination for generations.
Maybe branding people just get carried away. Check out the Samsung Ultra Edition 3Gs. Whether they're works of art is a matter of opinion, but each one is a pretty damn fine cell phone.
The Z720 (13.8mm) is positively chubby compared to its slightly older cousin, but it remains the thinnest HSDPA slide-up cell phone on the market. The Z370 and Z260 are a bit narrower, using Samsung's advanced materials science to make them thin but strong.
So much for the detail. What's really interesting is the place they chose for the product launch: the Louvre, Paris. Launch location is the sort of thing that brand managers lie awake all night thinking about. So what does this choice tell us about the way Samsung wants us to view its new mobiles?
Well, before the French Revolution the Louvre was a royal palace - but presumably the Korean guys don't want us to associate their technology with an old, decadent, inefficient, despotic, uncaring organisation staffed by bewigged, puffy-faced autocrats. These days the Louvre is an art gallery containing famous pieces such as the Mona Lisa, so it's more likely they want us to consider the Ultra Edition phones as works of art, instant design classics that will live in our collective imagination for generations.
Maybe branding people just get carried away. Check out the Samsung Ultra Edition 3Gs. Whether they're works of art is a matter of opinion, but each one is a pretty damn fine cell phone.
The Nokia N91 and global domination
0 Comments Published by bill hilton on Saturday, September 02, 2006 at 9:06 PM.
I finally got my hands on a Nokia N91 the other day, courtesy of Chris Pilanka. It's the cell phone that Nokia bosses seem to think is going to quickly lead them to global (if not galactic) domination by, ooh, this time next week.
In case you didn't know, The devious Finns have launched in Nseries with lots of multimedia widgetry. The N91 has got a 2 megapixel camera, an MP3 player and four gigs of storage space. The idea is that every digital camera maker in the word will go bust and the N91 and its siblings will have such a huge impact on the MP3 market that iPod sales will slide and Steve Jobs will ride backwards to Helsinki on a reindeer just to beg for a slice of the Scandinavian action.
Er, I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. Nobody is going to buy a mobile phone like this as their sole camera - not now 8 megapixels are pretty much standard. (Not that anyone can tell the difference between 8 megapix and 2 megapix, but as in all things there's a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses schtick going on here). Equally, as far as being an MP3 player goes, cell phone manufacturers have got some way to go before their products acquire cachet of coolness required to penetrate the vital twentysomething hipster market, which is still in love with the cool lines of the iPod.
Where the Nseries is going to hit hard, I predict, is with kids and students. As far as school-age teens are concerned, the N91 offers more scope for alleviating boredom and/or causing classroom chaos than any other previous cell phone.
The N91 is light, slim and sexy, though it doesn't quite have the high-grade back pocket slippability of an iPod. The sound quality is great, especially if you use it with good earpieces (Nokia recommends Bose and Sennheiser earpieces, apparently). The only thing you shouldn't do is try to connect the thing to your Mac. I'd heard the bad rumours, so I gave it a go - and yes, within thirty seconds both phone and Mac had crashed. It seems crazy that Nokia still haven't sorted this out. Macs are no longer a minority technology. It does suggest, however, that they're not really pursuing that 21-35 market, where Mac penetration is at its highest.
Nokia has also included a web browser, WiFi connectivity and loads of other nick-nacks and widgetry. Apparently, you can even use it to make phone calls. Now that's what I call revolutionary.
In case you didn't know, The devious Finns have launched in Nseries with lots of multimedia widgetry. The N91 has got a 2 megapixel camera, an MP3 player and four gigs of storage space. The idea is that every digital camera maker in the word will go bust and the N91 and its siblings will have such a huge impact on the MP3 market that iPod sales will slide and Steve Jobs will ride backwards to Helsinki on a reindeer just to beg for a slice of the Scandinavian action.
Er, I don't think so. Not yet, anyway. Nobody is going to buy a mobile phone like this as their sole camera - not now 8 megapixels are pretty much standard. (Not that anyone can tell the difference between 8 megapix and 2 megapix, but as in all things there's a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses schtick going on here). Equally, as far as being an MP3 player goes, cell phone manufacturers have got some way to go before their products acquire cachet of coolness required to penetrate the vital twentysomething hipster market, which is still in love with the cool lines of the iPod.
Where the Nseries is going to hit hard, I predict, is with kids and students. As far as school-age teens are concerned, the N91 offers more scope for alleviating boredom and/or causing classroom chaos than any other previous cell phone.
The N91 is light, slim and sexy, though it doesn't quite have the high-grade back pocket slippability of an iPod. The sound quality is great, especially if you use it with good earpieces (Nokia recommends Bose and Sennheiser earpieces, apparently). The only thing you shouldn't do is try to connect the thing to your Mac. I'd heard the bad rumours, so I gave it a go - and yes, within thirty seconds both phone and Mac had crashed. It seems crazy that Nokia still haven't sorted this out. Macs are no longer a minority technology. It does suggest, however, that they're not really pursuing that 21-35 market, where Mac penetration is at its highest.
Nokia has also included a web browser, WiFi connectivity and loads of other nick-nacks and widgetry. Apparently, you can even use it to make phone calls. Now that's what I call revolutionary.
At last: Americans are beginning to use SMS. Mobile users in Europe have been in love with texting for half a decade now - around two thirds of cellphone owners make at least some use of text messages.
In the States it's been very different. In 2003 just 25% of US users texted. Now it's 40% of around 200 million users (source: ft.com).
Why is this? Lack of literacy? Fat fingers? Laziness? Or - the conventional explanation - that pricing models in the States have lagged so far behind British and European counterparts that cellphone users over there have avoided texts because they haven't, so far, been economical. That explanation is lent a little extra weight by the fact that the increase in American SMS usage is in line with mobile providers' attempts to gain deeper market penetration by slashing costs.
But correlation doesn't equal causation. SMS has proved attractive to European right from the start, despite some expensive pricing, and in countries like UK has been one of the technologies that has had most impact on daily life over the past five years. Some people, especially kids and young adults, use their mobiles for texting far more than they use them for making voice calls.
I think SMS has been slower to take off among Americans because, in some ways, they are more technologically conservative than Europeans in their private lives. In the US, technology has traditionally been much more driven by the needs of business than by individuals seeking different ways of running personal social networks.
That is changing. It seems to me that a more important correlation is between US SMS usage the rise of Web 2.0. Americans are becoming culturally acclimatized to the idea of technology driving private lives as well as business ones. The popularity of MySpace and all the other social networking sites is evidence of this. Maybe it's the drive to use technology for greater social integration that's pushing up the popularity of SMS in the States. Europe - where, let's face it, everyone just lives more closely together, and there's a longer history of government-enforced social cohesion - was a much more natural marketplace for SMS when it first appeared.
In the States it's been very different. In 2003 just 25% of US users texted. Now it's 40% of around 200 million users (source: ft.com).
Why is this? Lack of literacy? Fat fingers? Laziness? Or - the conventional explanation - that pricing models in the States have lagged so far behind British and European counterparts that cellphone users over there have avoided texts because they haven't, so far, been economical. That explanation is lent a little extra weight by the fact that the increase in American SMS usage is in line with mobile providers' attempts to gain deeper market penetration by slashing costs.
But correlation doesn't equal causation. SMS has proved attractive to European right from the start, despite some expensive pricing, and in countries like UK has been one of the technologies that has had most impact on daily life over the past five years. Some people, especially kids and young adults, use their mobiles for texting far more than they use them for making voice calls.
I think SMS has been slower to take off among Americans because, in some ways, they are more technologically conservative than Europeans in their private lives. In the US, technology has traditionally been much more driven by the needs of business than by individuals seeking different ways of running personal social networks.
That is changing. It seems to me that a more important correlation is between US SMS usage the rise of Web 2.0. Americans are becoming culturally acclimatized to the idea of technology driving private lives as well as business ones. The popularity of MySpace and all the other social networking sites is evidence of this. Maybe it's the drive to use technology for greater social integration that's pushing up the popularity of SMS in the States. Europe - where, let's face it, everyone just lives more closely together, and there's a longer history of government-enforced social cohesion - was a much more natural marketplace for SMS when it first appeared.
