This weekend I needed to travel from London Bridge down to Kent for a friends Stag do. The train journey goes through some rather nice rural areas and, as generally happens when you get an unspoilt field, the phone signal bounced between 2G and no signal.
I was trying to watch some videos at the time, Microsoft Research and TED, and found myself getting annoyed when i’d suddenly be stopped by a buffering problem. Then I sat down and realised something – i’m no longer surprised and excited by what mobile technology delivers, rather I expect it to be there. I expect to be able to tweet, I expect to be able to stream video or send and receive emails wherever I am.
When did it change from becoming a fairly magical thing to be able to do all this stuff in the middle of nowhere to being a fact of everyday life and only noticed when it wasn’t working? I guess the easy answer is when the original iPhone came out, we expected a richer experience from our phones after that. But that can’t be the actual answer. Mobile networks didn’t come into being the day Apple bought its first generation mobile to the UK. Indeed I imported my first iPhone and it worked perfectly well nearly a year before O2 started shipping the official UK model.
So I started thinking back in my phone history, before the iPhone I had an XDA, a windows mobile based device, it could do email and internet. It wasn’t as easy to use as the iPhone but it was functional, but I don’t recall being secure with it’s internet abilities. Actually I remember them being pretty unreliable, so there wasn’t even magic let alone complacency. The phone before that was a Sony P900 – it was a great phone but not one that I used the internet with.
The shocking fact could only be that the iPhone did give me this complacency, the infrastructure was there already – the network was available, but nothing I used was ready to take advantage of it.
But it wasn’t the iPhone, certainly not the 1G iPhone. As I mentioned I imported it, I didn’t have a data contract with Vodafone at the time. The iPhone shouldn’t have worked with it and, as such, was certainly not a recommended device. My use of the internet was very much constrained to Wifi. I rarely, if ever, connected the iPhone to Vodafone’s 2G network (the most the original iPhone could handle). Straight after the iPhone I got an Android phone, the original HTC Google phone. I wanted the developer model but was unable to get one because the funds I had available were locked away in PayPal and I was too impatient to transfer them. So I ended up buying one from eBay. This time around I had a bolt-on which gave me a whole 1GB of data. Android was still pretty raw at this time and not everything worked well, but the beginnings of communication complacency were there. When I connected my Google account all of my email magically appeared and my contacts were forever backup up on Google (as they still are). The internet was ok too. Unfortunately, the person I bought the phone from then reported it lost to his mobile provider to get a new one, he didn’t realise this would automatically cause them to block the phone i’d bought off them. Several emails later I had my money back and no smartphone. But, my vodafone contract was nearing an end and they’d started supplying the 3GS – so I was able to jump to that.
I was already used to having my emails on demand (a quick connection to my google account sorted this – and synced my contacts back for me). Now I had apps too, most of my time with the 1G had been limited to either homebrew apps or web-based ones. Because of my data connection issues I didn’t use any web-based ones. The homebrew apps had some pretty good tools, but nothing in the area of what was available through the Appstore. Along with my 3GS contract I got 5GB of data allowance. More than enough to let my email sync and use messaging services to talk to people on the go.
So, annoyingly the actual reason I have become complacent about mobile technology isn’t solely, or even mostly, to do with the phones. It’s to do with feeling financially able to use it. Because I now have a safety net of free internet use I feel able to use it whenever I want to. There’s no way i’d have streamed video on the XDA, 1G iPhone or HTC phone – but all three were perfectly capable of doing it. I’d never have felt able to let my email sync in the background because of fear of my next bill.
But i’ll never feel complacent again – just a few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to do anything except call or text people on my phone. Now I can play online games, blog, tweet and update my Facebook or G+ status. I have a rich, almost desktop, experience with very little interruption. The signal will only get better, when the analogue signal is repurposed more of the country will have a stable wireless signal. Eventually the UK will understand the importance of having Wireless internet available and hopefully the government/telecoms bodies will do something about it. Then we can become complacent again for a lot longer.