Phone fun

I'm not sure if this is strictly within the remit of this blog, but it was too much fun not to share:

Predictive, yet unpredictable

James Meek
Friday January 13, 2006
The Guardian

[...] My 2005 Nokia won't recognise the words "Mozart" or "Beethoven", for instance. But it does recognise "Wagner" and "Strauss". It is familiar with "Nazi" and "communist"; but it hasn't heard of "haddock" or "avocado". It knows Picasso and Gaugin, but seems to be unacquainted with Raphael and Leonardo. Likes Elvis and Dylan; hasn't heard of the Beatles. Seattle, Quebec and Tampere (Finnish city, pop 200,000), yes; Newcastle, Cardiff and Sheffield (English city, pop half a million), no.

If you expect your Nokia to know what you're on about when you message your partner, "That shop in Bolton has the grout we need," it will begin grumpily demanding, "Spell?" If, however, you want to say: "Who's your favourite dictator, Stalin, Hitler, Franco or Napoleon?" the mobile understands exactly what you mean. My phone goes all talk-to-the-hand if I try to message somebody to remember to get the emulsion, and that Sainsbury's has guavas. But write: "Marxist dogma relies too heavily on the dialectical approach," and the Nokia begins, figuratively speaking, to nod in agreement.

On the basis of its vocabulary, in short, my 21st-century Nokia phone, if it were a person, would be a heavily bearded lecturer from the London School of Economics in 1975, smelling strongly of pipe smoke. And I'd be the last person to want that academic out of my mobile. I just wonder whether he might not be joined in there by someone a bit more UK 2006-specific.