I used to love traveling by train. You could do some work, relax and prepare meeting your clients. Basically an extension of my office. Compared to flying or driving by car it USED to be less stressful and very productive.

Not anymore.

The last few travels I was constantly surrounded by people blabbing on their cell phones. That is annoying. But it is young blabbering woman that annoy me the most. They high pitched voices and fast talking even penetrates the noise of the train (males voices drown in the noise and are easier to ignore). Even when I put on my headphones and some nice music - I still can hear them.

But most unnerving of all is the content of all that chatter: total idiocy. Blabla about the latest relationship gossip, the latest celebrity crap, what they had for dinner, how they felt about this or that. And they hysterically scream all that important stuff into their pink cell phones like the end of the world is near and all that chatter still could save us.

And that chatter literally goes on for hours. I now even had trips where several woman had more than one cell phone to blabber into (I guess the business line and the relationship phone).

I usually try to escape and find a seat in a section of the train with less woman and less chatter. I tried several times asked these sirens politely to lower their voices. But all you get is a blank stare. Maybe I simply should place myself beside these radio stations and join the conversations, since I am part of the affair anyway?  

But one of these days I am gonna freak out and silence one of these chatter boxes forever …

Image by Koert van Mensvoort 

Annoyed by cell phones all over the place? People talking all the time? Too bad. But we humans need to communicate for our social and individual survival. Communication is an essential part of our existence to reflect ourselves and connect to the group consciousness.

It really starts in the womb and ends with death. In between we are busy communicating, exchanging ideas, learning, archiving, expanding and revising knowledge.

In recent years we have seen an explosion of girly tech - gadgets specifically designed to appeal to woman’s sense of cuteness, styling and beauty.

But this new Sony Ericson phone in combination with it’s product website really takes the cake. A gold-pink cell phone is bad enough - but on a neon-green background?

Gimme a break. I’ll sue them for eye cancer!

But there are many golden, pink and other soft coloured gadgets out there - that are equally bad in terms of design and colour harmony.

Are woman really that hungry for pinkness in their mind? You girls know that pink is used to reflect your genitalia.

So in that context the Sony Ericson cell phone above ’says’: pink pussy below - and attracted to gold in the head, press the knobs to make her ring …

So Ladies - and don’t forget to ‘Bling’ your pink gadget to increase the girly ranking in your circle.

Gee, is it already over ten years ago that these oversized pocket calculators achieved the final breakthrough of the PDA? Together with the mainstream revolution of the WWW suddenly cell phones and personal digital assistants exploded everywhere.

Palm created 1996 a huge market that was invented by Apple with it’s Newton 1992. But the original Newton was a brick compared to the slender Palm (which would appear huge compared to today’s machines). And it played nicely with a Mac and a PC. Something Apple always hated until they finally ‘got it’ with the iPod.

Suddenly everyone wanted to have one of these organizers - in every meeting people would try to take notes with Graffiti - a special sign language to make the computer better understand human handwriting. Most people ended up using the keyboard map instead.

Today the PDA’s are slowly disappearing - or better say evolving into the smart phones. Today almost any cell phone offers an extended address book and scheduler. If you need more power - you simply use a notebook or small laptop. Especially since PDAs from Palm and Windows CE are bloody expensive.

The whole PDA market will be killed by smart phones. There is no need to have a small computer if you cell phone can organize your life as well.

More? Palm Pilot @ Wikipedia

Ok, it began with fast food and pizza restaurants. Grabbing a bite in our hectic days makes sense, having the same boring food all over the world doesn’t.

Then came the Coffee Shops to give us the extra needed caffeine kick and sugar rush - plus some free wireless access. Well, still makes sense - although I hate the standard Ikea-Starbucks nesting instinct that’s developing globally.

But who needs a cell phone store - one for each provider - on every highstreet? It’s not that we need a daily supply of ‘phonettes’, batteries or ‘call minutes’?! We maybe upgrade our phone once a year or change our contracts maybe every two?

These shops are there mostly for presence, marketing and showing off their brand. I rather have some good old sandwich shops or some other specialized merchant that sells anything BUT a cell phone, a burger or a Latte.

Our inner cities have lost their unique mix of local shops and retailers. Almost all over the planet the big shopping centers offer the same crap from the same crappy companies. So much about free markets, choice for the consumer and competition.

Germany had the ‘pleasure’ to be the first EU country to issue biometric passports - which will be the norm for the future. Around here there are hardly any protests against this, since personal ID cards (Personalausweis) are mandatory anyway - and these have been machine readable for a long time.

I think it’s pretty silly to talk about Big Brother and total tracking - since this has been possible for a long time. First it were credit cards that allowed a pretty good tracking of your habits and financial life and now finally cell phones are even better at tracking your every movement.

Most of all - we brave consumers - give our data to companies and providers like Google more or less freely. You can’t have a ‘trackless’ life anymore.

So any Police State or Fascist regime works without much technology - it depends on the people in power. Sure technology makes it easier, but technology doesn’t automatically lead to a tyrant regime. The Romans did pretty well without computers.

More? BBC articles and reference

Copenhagen 7. September 1987: telcos from thirteen european nations give birth to the digital GSM network we all know and use today. Cell Phones have been around before - but this was the new age - the digital age.

You see above the Motorola Dynatac the first commercially available cell phone for a mere $4000.

Today 2,5 billion people use cell phones. About 7 billion SMS are sent each day.

BBC: Mobiles for the ‘world’s poorest’

Forget the 100 Dollar Laptop - the good old mobile phone is proving to be a techno tool for change. Cell towers are cheaper and easier to install then landlines over huge ‘empty’ areas. Cell phones themselves are easy to learn and use without much literacy and they can also recharged with solar energy or little electricity.

Most of all it simply helps people to communicate and start a business. This is especially important in rural areas in Africa were basics of simple communication and even often transportation are lacking. With a cell phone news travels fast … and some progressive speed is something Africa and the poor can use.

In that context: if you have an old cell phone or if you upgrade in the near future donate your that thing to wirelessrecycling.com. And there are many other organizations that can use your mobile for other purposes.

See also Africa’s mobile entrepreneurs

As any old time Newton owner can attest you: not everything Apple designs is golden. Enter the iPhone - the most overhyped product launch evaaar.

If you told people thirty years ago that people would que to buy a phone you would have been locked away. As should these nerds and Apple fan boys who are willing to pay stupid amounts of money for an overdesigned gadget.

As long as coolnes and feature overkill rule the market we get more and more tech gizmos that do just the same, but more complicated and more expensive.