It's exactly ten years since I bought my first mobile phone. I didn't really want one, I couldn't see the need, but I was cajoled and ultimately persuaded. My first mobile was a Motorolamr501, one of the first sub-brick fliptop phones, and it cost me £49.99. It had an extendable aerial, because that's what phones needed in those days, and it opened with a satisfying click. The very first phone call I made was to my parents and lasted 4 minutes and 38 seconds. It was downhill from there on.
My first phone couldn't do much. It could ring people, and it had an adjustable answerphone message, and it could run out of battery power in 2 days flat. Plus there was a new mysterious feature called text messaging. Very early on I had a go at "texting", as it would later be called, but the one other person I knew with a mobile wasn't really interested so the novelty soon wore off. And that was about the limit of my new phone's features. No games, no annoying ringtones, no online web browser, nothing that today's mobiles take for granted. But it had all of the key features that I still use now (on phone number 4), and none of the 3G-hungry extras.
I used to check my phone far too often to see if anybody had called, but nobody had. Then I learnt not to check it so often, which meant that on the rare occasion when somebody did ring I never noticed. Then they'd get annoyed ("I mean, what is the point of having a mobile phone if you don't use it?") and I'd go back to checking more often. My new mobile made me more accountable, and more subject to change and last-minute rearrangements ("I'm going to be late!" "I'm going to be very late!" "Tell you what, can you come and meet me?"). The power to communicate independently was in my hands, but also alas in other people's.
And then the bills came. They were low to start with, but then I had to use my phone beyond the scope of my monthly contract and they started getting higher. £1.30 for a five minute call, four quid for half an hour to another network - my mobile provider was merrily milking my bank balance. When I moved to London I started using my mobile a lot lot less, but I still forked out a tidy sum every month for the privilege of a monthly contract. I should have stopped before I'd paid out thousands of unnecessary pounds, but only last year did I switch to pay-as-you-go and I haven't looked back. Ten quid a month, max, that's much more realistic. I now exploit my phone, my phone doesn't exploit me.
Few inventions have transformed society quite so dramatically and quite so rapidly as the mobile phone. Back in 1998 my mobile was a relative rarity, but now the majority of the population can't go anywhere without one. If you choose, you need (almost) never be uncontactable. Why be bored when you can ring a mate and pointlessly gossip, whenever, wherever. SMS messaging has helped to introduce a newly-evolved form of shallow abbreviated English ("u calln mi fik!?"). Meanwhile fledgling web services are merely scratching the surface of facilities we'll all take for granted before the next decade is up.
My mobile still doesn't ring often enough for me to be truly addicted, obviously. But you're welcome to give me a call on 07... you know, same number as ten years ago.
It's exactly ten years since I bought my first mobile phone. I didn't really want one, I couldn't see the need, but I was cajoled and ultimately persuaded. My first mobile was a Motorola mr501, one of the first sub-brick fliptop phones, and it cost me £49.99. It had an extendable aerial, because that's what phones needed in those days, and it opened with a satisfying click. The very first phone call I made was to my parents and lasted 4 minutes and 38 seconds. It was downhill from there on.
