Originally uploaded by _Polarity

Camera phones are worthless and shit. They involve too much sacrifice. That’s been the party line for the last decade and we’re not budging. For all my college years, militantly armed with a canary yellow Nokia 5110, all I wanted was a phone on which I could call people and be called in turn, on a screen illuminated in luscious neon green. And I would, maybe, send a text message or two, but not by using predictive text and certainly without photos. Photos are taken on proper cameras, not phones. A plastic peephole in the back of a manky handset does not a camera make. Even the fancy-shmancy louvred shutter graphics on the iPhone mean little to me. Phones is phones. Cameras is cameras. And the internets is on computers and computers alone.

FOLLY YOU HEATHEN! THE INTERNETS IS EVERYWHERE! IT’S IN YOUR SITTING ROOM, IT’S ON THE STREET AND IT’S VIBRATING IN YOUR PANTS!

Oooh, so it is. Hello there. I still don’t like phonecams, but I will admit that the internet on a phone has been a revelation.  I now use a Blackberry Pearl, because I’m still a closet purist and I like my phone to look like a phone, but I have it rammed with as much subtle connectivity as my bunleibhéal tech knowledge will allow. Twibble is on there for Twittering while I’m on the go, or even on the loo. (My Dad had a landline installed in the bathroom, meaning I can take calls simultaneously). My Gmail, into which I feed five email addresses, is on there too, and its constant connectedness helps me distract myself from mundane tasks, like driving a car or concentrating on real work. My Google Reader is my phone’s browser home page, feeding me a stream of news and nonsense, generously mixed, and my Google Calendar is synced with my Blackberry calendar. As a result, my phone buzzes more often than a bee with epilepsy. Internet stuff is shovelled into my little fruity handset like grain into the neck of a foie gras goose and its red ‘pay me attention’ light blips its message of internetty fullness almost constantly. It begs to be played with.

And I do, I pander to it. I answer its every buzz, blink and brrring. I am not alone. The like of iPhones and Blackberries are fucking huge right now (see pic – wowsers). In fact, if you go onto Flickr and search for pictures tagged with the word ‘Blackberries‘, the majority of the results are entirely bereft of real berries. Swollen phones abound in their stead, phones which won’t stain your hands or clothes in the slightest, nor get seedy bits stuck under your dentures, but which will taste absolutely shit if baked into a crumble.

People aren’t buying them for their imaging capabilities, either, it’s for the constant stream of words they bring us, handily supplied by the magical, omnipresent internet. When we’re not talking to people, we want to be chuckling at their 140-character messages and reading their news. And phones with internet capability make it so. It can only get better.

This rambling post serves very little purpose indeed, but I should point out that it was inspired by Mr Tom Raftery, who appropriately Tweeted earlier from his iPhone that ‘phones will be the primary Internet device by 2020′, while expressing disbelief that it will take that long. If, in the space of five months, a Luddite like me can be swayed to constantly pull a phone out of his pocket and read stuff it has plucked from t’internet, he’s probably right.

Now I’m off. It’s blinking at me. I have to go.