Columnists | Opinion

Columnist: Telephone teleports to new level with smart phones, texting

By Frank Booker

Posted on Oct. 26, 2011, at 10:12 p.m.

Remember when telephones were either hanging on the wall or perched on a stand?

Of course you don’t. Why would you want to when the modern alternative is pocket-quick and convenient?

Cell phones are multipurpose marvels that have been a part of our everyday lives for some time now. We are so familiar with using them for a broad range of communicatory purposes, we often forget what a miracle they are.

We can talk on them as well as send and receive written text and photos, listen to our favorite music, check weather conditions, read the latest news, find our way around, and check in on friends and family through Facebook or the latest social media — and the list doesn’t end there.

Some of us have more than one cell phone. In many enterprises, smart phones are a staple in corporate culture. They are capable of all of the above listed actions and can perform applications unique to the company involved.

Steve Bird, president of Culverson Software, a Maine engineering consulting firm, spoke of his work designing applications for corporate smart phones.

“What used to require a laptop to gather data in remote locations can now be accomplished through the use of wireless transducers communicating directly to a cell phone carried by an engineer at that location,” he said.

But cell phones often don’t fulfill the necessary security requirements for corporate use. BlackBerrys are frequently used for business applications because they have great security. There is also a new kid on the security block called BizzTrust, which could change the way we use smart phones.

BizzTrust creates a virtual work phone on Android smart phones using BlackBerry-style encryption. This ensures private communications, making it possible to use your Android phone for both work and personal applications.

On the personal side, the user is free to download and use whatever apps he or she wishes without any risk of compromising the work portion of the operating system. This modified Android software was unveiled in Germany on Oct. 11, and if it’s successful, all our needs would be fulfilled with one cell phone.

Or would they? Most people would feel uncomfortable with such a combination phone, regardless of the corporate promise not to eavesdrop. Therefore, we’ll probably continue to carry a second phone for personal use as an extra privacy precaution.

Another hot-button issue in the cell-phone sphere is texting. Today’s teens are all about the text, preferring it to actually talking. It has become so common that we are passing laws against the newest form of insanity — texting while driving. I asked my 16-year-old granddaughter if she would pay for an app that would transcribe voicemails into texts, and she got excited at the prospect.

“Oh, Papa, I would so pay for that! I could avoid listening to my mom ramble on and just go to the part where she’ll pick me up at 3 o’clock,” she said.

New dot-com start ups are available if you can figure out how to ensure accuracy, but of course, this could lead to bizarre misinterpretations. For instance, you could ask a friend to do you a favor and save your butt, but autocorrect insists that you want your butt shaved instead. I can see myself now attempting to explain to my wife that I really meant I was going to be late tonight, not laid.

Cell phones and networks are getting better all the time, but obviously not without problems. Consider the new 4G wireless networks.

“4G is the shorthand for fourth-generation wireless (3G is third-generation), though the version of 4G currently available in the United States could be more accurately be described as advanced 3G,” according to The Huffington Post.

The faster speed will eat up bandwidth, causing higher usage and resulting in added cost to the end user. This actually adds to technical difficulties like dropped calls.

At this point, 4G is only in a limited number of cities, and if you have a 4G wireless plan, you will not be able to use it in 3G areas because of switching difficulties. It will be several years before more than 5 percent of cell phone users will be employing the higher speed network. That’s nothing short of sluggish in today’s rapid-growth tech environment.

One of the most interesting uses of cell phone is a new art form called the “cell phone novel,” where the “novelist” creates a story in text messages limited by the maximum number of characters that can be sent in a text message at one time. They are very popular in Japan and China, where cell phone use is far more common. In Japan last year, five out of the top 10 novels were cell phone novels. People wait for their daily text installment.

This recalls the heyday of the British novel, when Americans would wait for the steamer to come in with the latest installment of the serially published Dickens stories. But these Japanese and Chinese cell phone novels are rarely translated to English. Still, the breadth of cell phone capabilities never fails to excite me.

I’m thinking my cell phone alone may provide a new way for me to submit my column. I wonder what my editor would say about that.

Frank Booker is a non-traditional student. Follow him @papabooker on Twitter or Frank Booker on Facebook.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2011, 10:12 pm. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.