Yo say what, Mo-Pho?

I want more wireless.  It is since getting a not-a-phone-iPod that the frustration has boiled so it is only in the last six months that I have really noticed this.  Having had a smartphone for two years had almost disguised the need for it.   

            In many ways I like the Touch, it does a variety of things my little old nano could never have done.  Typically for a computer-update, it also does a lot of stuff I never really thought nor cared about.  But now I can do these things, I do, and I think they are quite fun and only slightly procrastination-making.  I have not yet given in to the temptation of Angry Birds, however. 

            For those who do not know, the Touch does everything an iPhone does except be a phone.  Thus if I want to do anything useful, or even useless (Check-in on facebook) It has that nice large screen which is completely impossible to type accurately and meaningfully on (“these hands were absolutely built to play Rachmaninoff, darling”) but has plenty of space for music and whatever other dross I want to put on there.  The camera is a murky and basically an option-less affair but it is another feature and it does alright if you want to send a blurry photo to facebook that needs to be rotated through 90° by the viewer. 

            It does make one wonder what is to happen next though.  Where can the iPod Touch go next?  Apple might argue that it is one of many products that fits into a market that demands a variety of hand-held devices.  Despite Apple’s success, sadly, it has yet to gain supremacy of the smartphone market—that goes to Blackberry, at least in numbers.  In fact there are now estimates to suggest that the 8520 curve is a better selling phone in Britain, than any iPhone.  One thing the iPhone can do that the BB cannot however is a check-in on facebook.  Thus, the option is not so much an indicator of where you are, but which instrument you use.  However the tussle for first and second position is not over yet.  Other contenders seem unlikely for the time being though, with Android—the second and much more successful incarnation of the rather flat Windows Mobile—in third, and Nokia and Samsung with their efforts languishing below this. 

            So short of a shift in the market that I as one consumer cannot elicit, where do I go?  Internet on telephones—smartphones or not—is finding it hard to advance.  It feels pretty indistinguishable from what it was on computers ten years ago when broadband was just starting to fall into the mainstream, i.e. was still a bit crap, and websites were designed for 800x600 resolution as a maximum.  This was not a happy time, let me tell you in case you were not there.  Perhaps it will be like Africa.  Here there is a fast-growing market in smartphone use (Digital Africa, J. M. Ledgard, Intelligent Life, Spring 2011) on which they use any and all websites on the tiny screen and get on with it, to a fashion.  In the West, we use websites that are designed for it, or applications that avoid the need for websites altogether. 

            Whatever happens, the zeitgeist is very much with this movement.  Six continents demand it—wireless on Antarctica is just hassle, trust me—and yet it fails to emerge.  If you walk around with an iPod Touch and want wireless, such oases are few and far between.  This is the thing: there is no point in someone providing it because then you well spend the whole time chatting or doing or spending something or someone else.  And you can probably do that on your phone anyway.  If you have the right phone, that is...