Succumbing to convergence.

Like most people who were already well grown up when cellular telephony was invented, I missed out on the formation of that deep-seated need to have a mobile phone about my person that characterises younger folk. I am never going to be panicked by the prospect of not being in 24/7 telephonic contact with my friends.  I’ve worn a watch since my 11th birthday and, if I’m ever deprived of my watch, I have withdrawal symptoms: I feel ill at ease; I have a nude left arm; I am vaguely vulnerable. I have even known myself to wear my watch when it is not working, to spare myself the discomfort of going watchless. My watch-dependency is sub-rational and, ever since I’ve had a mobile phone that tells the time, it is irrational.  Having a watch was grafted into my labile young self-image; having a mobile wasn’t.

Mobile phones have had to inflitrate my habits and needs when they were mature habits and needs, unaided by the sort of emotional bondage that my first wristwatch exerted on me, and it has taken a very long time for them to make deep inroads. I got my first “mobile” phone in 1992. A high-end, light-weight BT model of the day, it weighed 1/2 lb and I carried it, in my rucksack or briefcase,  only when I planned to make or receive calls out of reach of a landline. I’ve had a mobile ever since but have never felt the stirrings of a phone nut within me. My first couple of smartphones – a Nokia 7650 in 2002 and a then a 6670 in 2004, the former classic device, the latter a turkey – were actually not mind-alteringly superior to my last “dumb” phone, but twice as big and heavy. They doubled up as low quality cameras, which was useful, and it was helpful that they connected with PCs – especially to get the low-quality pictures out.  It wasn’t until I got my current Nokia N98 8GB a year-and-half ago that I started to sense that the device had really transcended its utility niche in my activities and become my pocket life-tool.  It was important the that camera was by now as good as my rudimentary skills can well exploit, but far from decisive.

When smartphones were the next big thing, pundits often impatiently and sceptically broached the question of what their “killer app” was going to be and when it would show up. But there was vanishingly little chance of an app showing up that would trump being a mobile phone, which was already old hat. Texting was a good second, but that was also old hat. The vision that the smartphone makers have always hewed to is that killer technologies, or killer synergies of technologies, could be made to converge with mobile telephony as they emerged, and support such rich environments of personal applications that holistically compelling devices could be brought to market, for all sorts of folk. And that is how it is panning out.

There’s no one feature or application on my N95 that gives it its invasive, pervasive  influence. It’s the sheer wealth of ever-ready, mobile, connected, personal usefulness that it packs. In this device, convergence achieved the tipping point where the vision started working, for me.

It was part of the vision that convergence could hook me in a way quite different from the way it hooks you.  The early combo of phone | camera clearly did it for a lot of us. The  phone | camera | jukebox | games-console envelope probably embraces the largest – certainly the most conspicuous and most courted – tribe of converged users now. But it doesn’t embrace me: I’m uninterested in software games and I prefer to live most of my life without a soundtrack.  The compelling converged device that the N95 embodies for me is a phone | camera | net-port | location-based information server.

A few weeks ago I went on holiday to my native Ireland. With my laptop and N95, I was fully covered for mobile technology. I knew I was going to spend most of my time with no conventional broadband provision, but my mobile handles that:  thanks to an app called JoikuSpot (http://www.joikushop.com/), I can use it as a personal WiFi hotspot anywhere I have mobile coverage. I knew I was going to need an overnight stop or two for short tours in the West, but I didn’t pin myself down with advance bookings: I could sort them out just-in-time on the web, anywhere. On the car I’d hired to collect at Belfast, I declined the GPS option: having Ovi Maps on my mobile would be good enough.

I also planned to keep up my running mileage on holiday. Runners are like that. I’m a cycling enthusiast too, and for both activities my mobile has become my motivational tool. I’ve got Nokia’s Sports Tracker app installed (http://sportstracker.nokia.com/). For running, I get shorts with a bum-pocket where the N95 fits snug. When I’m about to hit the road, I turn on Sports Tracker and it tracks my progress by GPS. When I finish, I stop Sports Tracker and it saves my workout: start-time, duration, distance, average and max speed. For running, I also get calorie consumption.  I upload the workout to my page on the Sportstracker website.  When I visit my page, I can see the route plotted on Google Maps. I can see the stats, and the graph of my speed over altitude. All my previous efforts are likewise available, and I’ve got cumulative training bar charts by days, weeks, or months.  Heart-rate junkies can link Sports Tracker by bluetooth to a Polar HRM belt and upload that data to their web page.  I never quite talked myself into shelling out for a dedicated GPS training computer and now I don’t need one: it’s been folded into my phone.

But inside the terminal at Birmingham airport, I discovered that I didn’t have my phone. I pictured myself leaving it behind on the kitchen table in Oxford, when my son phoned me to rendezvous for the trip just as I was about to walk out. (As it transpired 10 days later, it had actually fallen onto the floor of my car when we got out at the airport long-stay. ) I felt my first deep pang of mobile phone deprivation. I had no phone, no alarm clock, no camera, no email, no web, no GPS navigation, maps or location-based information, and no Sports Tracker! I tasted what I suppose is already the clinically identified dread of being offline.

All the same, I kept my head, experienced no impulse to head back to Oxford for my phone and succeeded in enjoying a memorably fun holiday without it. My son, of course, had his own camera phone, and even in a B&B in Donegal there is now likely to be free WiFi for the laptop toting traveller. I found myself capable of relishing my runs on the scenic coastal pathways of Belfast Lough, unbothered by the lack of GPS logging. Convergence has morphed my mobile into a my pocket life-tool, but I can still quickly regress to an unconverged modus vivendi.  If I’d discovered that I’d somehow come on holiday without my watch, I’d have had to buy another one at the airport.