I’m going on a phone hunt.

I’m going to catch an iPhone.

It costs almost £1000!

I’m not scared.*

In truth, I am scared because I have never bought a Steve Jobs product directly, except things like the movie Toy Story. That doesn’t count because I think it is true to say that Pixar got successful when Jobs was looking the other way trying to recreate Apple at NeXT and only partly succeeding. iTunes is free, so that does not count either, and I would have bought the two album downloads and two individual tracks anyway.

My current MP3 player is in my Windows smartphone, so unfortunately I have to be geeky enough to figure out Media Player and its odd syncing protocol. I am, for now, an iPod-free zone.

For a long time I operated what you might call a “Best Nokia Heuristic”, i.e. just buying the best phone that Nokia makes. This was a business decision that started when I bought the earliest GSM phones to equip my team of reporters at Opec meetings (there goes another Opec reference, folks!).

It had been preceded by another heuristic — the “It Must Work in a Lift Heuristic”. Only Nokias did at that time. Eccentrically, I would also test them by descending into the basement area of the Espree Health Club behind Fleet Street. The staff at Charles Dunstone’s Carphone Warehouse, still in the early days of its emerging success story, was always very obliging with demo product. This particular rule of thumb derived from a most extraordinary moment when one of my colleagues found himself in the Geneva Intercontinental Hotel, with an open line to the Knight-Ridder newswire copy desk, and the UAE oil minister and poet Mana Saeed Al-Otaiba stepped into the elevator with him, flanked by bodyguards. The reporter offered him the phone, and the opportunity to talk directly to the oil markets. A quick exchange and, to my certain knowledge of those days, the only example of an official source dictating his own story live and on the record to the financial markets. An early example there of the technology making the journalist redundant.

Procuring good mobile phones in the early days in Vienna and Geneva was never too easy, and certainly not cheap. The first occasion that mobile phones were requested by Reuters and myself via the Vienna Marriott they came attached to 12v car batteries. Not very portable.

GSM was a godsend, because it meant you could buy a phone in London, use it in either city and worry about the bills later. (In contrast to local rental phones, GSM was still much cheaper with roaming charges.) Our bills had once been so high for these events that I investigated whether it was possible to buy an analog phone in London, hack it, and subscribe independently to the Austrian PTT mobile service. Not having an Austrian bureau was the major obstacle.

Nokia 1011 Nokia 2110

Nokia 8110 (the “banana phone”) Nokia 7110 WAP Phone

The first GSM Nokia was the 1011. Analogue phones were getting smaller by then, and would continue on until Motorola brought out the clamshell StarTAC. Favoured by icons like super-pseud Frasier Crane it was very elegant, but not fit for purpose, ie it could not survive the bus journey home from the news bureau with even a sober journalist. In contrast to its analogue counterparts, the 1011’s bulk looked like a throwback. I was advised by colleagues that this time I’d made a mistake. They thought that size mattered when comparing devices with their colleague competitors. But function was preferable to form in the newsire business because speed of filing mattered above everything else. A GSM signal did not drop out as easily as an analogue one. A great many editorial wins were more a consequence of working tools than journalistic excellence, but don’t tell anyone that I said so.

Subsequent phones got smaller more quickly. Our reporters returned from assignments with stories of trouble-free communication and woe on the part of their competitors. “They want to know what phones we use.” How obvious did Nokia need to be?

The 2110 followed, and then the most beautiful of all mobile phones — the 8110 banana phone. The 8110 was also the first phone I felt confident enough to experiment with mobile data transfer from a laptop. I devised a little experiment. Could I file a story to the wire without wires, as it were, from the French side of the Eurostar, where the maximum speed touches 200 mph. It worked, admittedly not perfectly, but for a mashup of laptop, mobile phone and 1980s mainframe technology, it looked pretty bullet-proof compared with the web of wires and plugs I’d got used to procuring in kits named things like “Ultimate Road Warrior.” This was 1997. Yessssssssssssss! Real-time journalism was now literally wireless.

Why is this important? Well, what hacks off the hack at the moment is the BBC advert for its news website which plays hard on the fact that it updates every minute. The way this is reinforced within the advert is by the cohort of BBC reporters in the field, out there tapping on laptops and Blackberries with gay abandon. Now, in 2003 after the Hutton Inquiry, BBC News 24 was lambasted for sending its reporters down to the hearings with no means to file live. The sessions were not closed to mobile computers, so there was no effective embargo until each session ended. You could file in real-time, as indeed Sky News did. So I say to the BBC that mobile reporting is so twentieth century. And it is odd that we the audience are supposed to be impressed with technology we own for ourselves in droves.

The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X — a real brick Timeport — not a brick

Time has moved on, and even kids today get sniffy about phones like the first triband Motorola Timeport, a breakthrough phone in its day for the international traveller since it worked in the US and Europe. I even saw it used by the 9/11 hijackers in a reconstruction, and would be interested to know the historical accuracy of that piece of drama. My son takes one to school, and he gets teased. They call it “a brick”. But they know nothing about bricks! It was one of only two Motorolas I ever used. The first was a real brick, the legendary brick (see picture). When I first had budgetary responsibility as a bureau chief, I inherited a contract for one, which as I recall was then equal to my car allowance c£500 per month. But don’t quote me – it might be an emerging fisherman’s tale.

Now, to bring things back up to date and consider why I’d cough up £1000 for 18 months’ access to the iPhone, a very brief demo over the weekend convinced me this is a very different machine indeed. While I’ve gotten used to using a smartphone, taking bad photos and enjoying Russ Roberts Econtalk podcasts on the MP3 player, there is still something reminiscent of the Nokia’s first Wap phone, the 7110. It promised internet connectivity and I think I once got a couple of stock quotes and a train timetable out of it. But as we all know now, it was the triumph of hype over experience.

That said, I do use my Orange SPV 2000 (aka the HTC Blue Angel) a lot; to check for emails, including using Gmail. And I was surprised and a little impressed that I could pick up Facebook through a decent PDA interface. But it does insist on turning itself on when I don’t want it to, and taking videos and pictures at will, despite my reprogramming the buttons. It does not easily present voicemail and I often can’t hear it ring.

But the thing I like most about my smartphone was that, having not bought a phone since 2001 and that last business purchase being a Nokia 6210, Orange gave me this one for free. So it met the “Gift-horse Mouth-staring Heuristic”.

The iPhone is something completely different, and reminds me of the Eureka moment on the Eurostar. That was all about transmitting data while on the move, but the iPhone is about receiving. It is clear to me that this is a communication tool that will change behaviours. The screen quality is awesome: you just want to use it. And if I weren’t sure, I could just apply a “Stephen Fry Heuristic” (i.e. if it’s good enough for Stephen Fry etc etc).

So, in the interests of journalistic inquiry I think I must get one.

* with apologies to Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen, author of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt – an oft-read title, once upon a time, in the knackered household to the little chips off the old hack)

Related Posts:-

corridors and lifts

stopping time

gerd instinct

stephen fry is on the blog

Donate and help me buy back my Fender ('About' tells you why)

Share This

Related Posts

1. i went on a phone hunt
2. a robot is for life, not just for christmas (lego version)
3. macca flees record industry dinosaurs
4. how “chippy” do you like your ice cream?
5. a snowman’s chance in hollywood

Tags: -finance-and-markets, Apple, behaviour, business, celebrities, collaboration, competition-and-performance, creativity, iPhone, iPod, journalism, life-the-universe-and-everything, new-technology, newswire-journalism, Opec, Steve-Jobs, what hacks off the hack?