There is a woman looking at me. I see her in the corner of my eye as I browse through t-shirts in a clothes shop. A glance over to her tells me that it’s not me but the thing in my hand that is inviting this attention. Her tone is of callous sarcasm; “nice phone”.
I may not be used to hearing this from complete strangers, but the general sentiment of this comment is often directed at me and my Nokia 1100. People regularly offer remarks when they see the strange old-fashioned device, usually something along the lines of how this isn’t the ‘90s anymore.
Like most phones from that early era of mobile technology, the Nokia 1100 does not have many of the features that we expect from something that fits in our pockets today. It doesn’t have a camera, access to the internet, a music player, a GPS, a touch screen or even a colour screen. But while smartphones boast all of these things and much more, I still think that the classic Nokia represented the peak in development of mobile phones.
The universally recognisable Nokia 3210, released in 1999, was the first mobile not to have a visible external aerial on the handset. This feat of technology may seem unimpressive now, but it created a phone that was actually “mobile”. We now had a pocket-sized device with which we could make phone calls and send text messages. Since this day – the golden age of mobile phones – all other technological advances have only really equipped the archetypal Nokia model with unessential extras.
The classic Nokia may not be able to do everything a modern phone can, but it does what it does very well. Firstly, they are incredibly reliable. When smartphones crash, they crash hard. A friend recently spent a whole day trying to bring his new Nokia Lumia back to life after it decided to stop working, but even after two separate trips through the washing machine and countless drops onto hard surfaces, my Nokia is still in a perfect working condition.
On top of this, classic Nokias have amazing battery lives (I charge mine about once a week), all the necessary apps (Calculator, stopwatch, alarm clock and reminders. You don’t need any others), and, for entertainment, Nokias offer the best game there is: Snake.
That list may appear small in comparison to what a smartphone offers, but I can’t see how much, if anything, the mind-blowing technology that has been piled into our phones has done to improve our lives. In fact, they’re worse than nothing: smartphones have an actively negative influence.
Smartphones make communication and entertainment so easy that real-life social interaction becomes the hard option and thus declines. And, as we can all testify, even when a smartphone-owner is reluctantly drawn from the virtual world into a social situation, their attention is constantly sucked back by beeping alerts and flashing lights.
Despite this dependence, outside the dark recesses of today’s youth, there aren’t many who would argue that their smartphone constitutes a necessity for life. When I present my argument against the superiority of the smartphone to people, their response is generally something like “but it just makes life easier, doesn’t it?” This, to some extent, I can see. Why carry around a camera, an iPod and a phone when you could own one device that operates all these functions? Who needs to own and know how to read maps when you have something in your pocket that will direct you anywhere? What could be more useful than having the internet – the entire accumulation of human knowledge – at one’s finger tips at all times?
So yes, maybe smartphones do indeed make life easier. But how easy do we want life to be? The day when we can fulfil all human activities – eat, sleep, earn, shop, reproduce and excrete – without leaving our high-tech toilet chair is not a day towards which we strive. Without some challenges, there isn’t much left.
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