Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Ben Harvey is possibly from a small planet in the vicinity of Beetlejuice. This week, our favourite Friday afternoon provocative columnist talks about the differences between men and women.

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I do love stereotypes. I do! They make the world easier for my tiny mind to comprehend. Lots of people consider stereotypes to be lazy generalisations at best, and rude & blinkered misogyny at worst, but I find them to be useful metaphors. As such, this article is packed full of them. 

Please write your letters of complaint to Ewan, by the way.

Disclaimer over, you must now brace yourself for an article based solely around my own Neanderthalic observations about the differences between men and women. Perhaps, actually, I’d better clarify that statement, because the differences between men and women are many and various and often fleshy & dangly, so I’ll start again – the difference between men and women in terms of how they view, use and live with their mobiles.

Differences between the genders – fleshy, tufty stuff aside – have always been a source of amusement & confusion and a rich vein of material for stereotype-loving social-snipers like me to mine. Slanderous swipes about shoes, football, handbags, personal hygiene & the ability to park aside we are, of course, all quite aware of the existing prejudices about men & women’s telephone usage, being that male-to-male telephone calls are often blunt grunts, lasting the length of time of the average sneeze, whereas female-to-female calls are more like the Big Bang; they start for no reason at all, and even though the important stuff is achieved in the first ten seconds the rest of it drags on and on interminably, only coming to an abrupt halt when Hollyoaks comes on the telly.

I’m sorry – that’s not the Big Bang. For some reason I’ve just described my sex-life.

I’ll continue with an apology, as well, because I’m about to use the phrase “male to female”, and as such I’ve probably just lost half my audience due to their content-firewalls blocking this page. I imagine several hundred people are now in the process of getting a sharp note from their IT department, but that’s beside the point rather; male-to-female calls themselves are all perfectly normal in the business world, but when the participants are in a personal relationship the calls, again, are often like my sex-life; starting in a blaze of fire but ending in a cold, barren, collapsing morass of heaviness & inertia, the same boring nonsense happening again and again and again.

I’m sorry – that’s not my sex-life. For some reason I’ve just described the Big Bang.

Anyway, where were we? I believe I was about to reel off some stereotypes for you. But in the interest of not getting any more hate-mail than I already am, I’ll pre-empt your wrath by backing them up with statistics. So, here we go…
Men are more interested with fashion than women

Admittedly this may well change with the increasing glut of cross-marketed fashion-house telephones (the Gucci handsets are indeed lovely. But how long until Primark release a co-branded bleeper…?) but, at the moment, it’s chaps who actually seem to care more about how their handsets look. When buying a new handset (or, if you’re anything like me, when you’re choosing which of your friends’ you’re going to steal) the main factors are – and probably always will be – compatibility, price, build-quality and utility. However, after that, the genders seem to split – after those four factors males tend, next, to opt for looks and styling and women tend to then opt for security & safety.

These marketing results don’t – rather obviously – take account of people buying the latest models just for the hell of it and will also exclude anybody even remotely considering a 7280, or that nice new Razr with the mirror-finish that you can snort your cocaine off of. These results do include those people who buy handsets primarily because this week you get treble Nectar points.

Women are less stupid than men

Someone, somewhere got a grant to watch people as they crossed a busy street. Paying attention only to those people who were talking into their handsets at the time they studied 270 women and 276 men. Compared to those people that weren’t on the phone, the mobile-using women tended to cross more slowly, with close to half waiting for the passing cars to be halted by traffic-lights before stepping off the pavement.

Half of the men also crossed the road whilst the cars were stationary, but this had nothing to do with traffic-lights; the cars were stopped because of all the accidents caused by the other half of the men walking straight into the path of an oncoming bus. The moral of this piece of otherwise-pointless research is as follows: if you’re a man, get either a taxi or a sex-change.

Women are more likely to have annoying ringtones

59% of all ringtones are downloaded by women.

All ringtones are annoying.

The prosecution rests.

Women are less stupid than men (2)

Again, according to academic papers with long words in them (I’m not omitting them because I think you can’t understand them, by the way, I just can’t be arsed to type them out and then, later, wrestle my spellcheck into submission) of all the people arrested or cautioned for driving whilst talking on their mobile, 64% were male and 35% were female. Given that yakking on your handset (hands-free being a different kettle of fish, of course) raises your braking distance from 31 meters to 46 meters, from a speed of 70mph, this is really a bit dim.

The police didn’t have records available for those people arrested or cautioned for applying mascara whilst waiting on sliproads on the way to work, though. Probably just as well, actually, because if my insurers found out about that I’d be in trouble…

Also, the sharp-eyed amongst you will have noticed that 64% and 35% only adds up to 99%. I guess that means that Michael Jackson does have a driving licence, after all.
Men are quicker on the uptake than women

Like Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt, us chaps do tend to adopt things very early. In the case of the mobile industry this can most clearly be seen in terms of 3G & media-usage; 70% of mobile media usage is male as opposed to just 29% female (again with Jackson ruining my totals).

Quite why this figure is so predominantly male-skewed is a mystery, but I have certain theories of my own, primarily due to males having a higher predisposition towards geekiness and also, of course, because men are rather more likely to be sending & receiving video-clips involving naked girls doing either very alluring or very disgusting things.

However, both males and females are equally balanced when it comes to watching Macaulay Culkin films over GPRS, with both genders each taking 0.1% of the market.

Oh! You pesky Jackson!

Women like their telephones, whereas men just use them

Now, I don’t have any solid figures to back that lot up, of course, but I’ve spent so much time – in researching this article – trawling my way through academic papers that use phrases like “by applying a covariance structure analysis, the correlations between latent and observable variables can be successfully visualised” that I no longer care, so, hey. The fact that women are more likely to form an almost emotional attachment to their handset is one that I’ve long suspected, so I set out to prove it.

This has roots in the fact that – again, with the stereotypes – men prefer tools, whereas women prefer artefacts. To prove this, I spent some time on dating websites. One of the set questions often asked by such sites is “what object could you not live without?”.

Of a sample of ten women of various ages & locations, eight of the girls I peered happily at included their phone in their answer. The other two were in prison, and therefore presumably not allowed to have one. Other answers included “Rimmel Concealer in Ivory”, “my dog”, and “I AM A VERY INDERVIDAL”.

Bless.

Grudgingly I did also inspect the profile of ten of my fellow males; out of those ten, only two of them listed their mobile as being something they couldn’t actually live without. Other sample answers include “my plasma TV”, “independence,”, “my computer”, “my computer”, “regional dialects” and “my computer”. So, the downside is that us men are all emotional cripples who are scared of social interaction. On the upside, I have a date for Friday night.

What?! He’s a doctor. With a plasma TV…

Ben Harvey, with his SMS Text News reporter badge covered in mud, has managed to transmit his latest Friday column to us from a field, somewhere near the little village of Glastonbury.

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So, there I was, knee-deep in mud (or, at least, something wet and brown), watching the Killers play at Glastonbury. Unfortunately, watching them was all I was doing because - due to having to find somewhere to pee (damn you, cider, damn you all to hell) - I’d relinquished my place towards the front of the stage and found myself at the rear of the enormous throng.

…I very nearly wrote “rear of the enormous thong” there…

Idiot jobsworths from the Council, who had turned the speakers down, I wasn’t actually able to hear them very well. Not being able to hear the music at a music festival isn’t actually the most fulfilling experience in the world and, as such, I was about to spin on my heel (or as much of a spin as I could manage, given that, technically, everything below my knees had sunk to underground status) and trudge back to Chez Harvey but, all of a sudden, the smokey air was filled with loud noise of Las Vegas kitsch-rock!

As it happened, the tendrils of Council Health & Safety hadn’t been vanquished but, instead, some cheeky sod in the crowd close to me had pulled out their mobile and started playing Killers tracks out from their little loudspeaker.

This worked well for five seconds before all the people laughing at the absurdity of the situation drowned out both the mobile and the main speakers, but it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it.

Anyway, the fact that mobiles are now so deliciously versatile does gladden my heart. And, in the context of festivals - or any other event organised by the Somme Recreation Society - I’ve put together a little list of reasons why they’re just so, so bloody useful…

1. Calling for help

Cries for help come in many forms; drunken calls to ex-girlfriends, calls to the police because your ex-boyfriend is stalking you, that sort of thing. However, this Glastonbury was marked by the rain, and the solid, unremitting mud the ensured. I managed to escape reasonably easily but others weren’t so lucky – my friend Chris, for example, was stuck in the car-parking fields for fifteen hours.

As we made our way out, staring out of the car windows that were running with the condensation from our own clothing, the one thing that really struck me was the number of people by mud-glued cars, phoning for the AA or the RAC or any other bugger that could come and pull them out. Can you imagine trying to organise that with phone-booths…?

2. Finding stuff

Tents, at night, are not the most easy of domiciles to find things in. Glasses case? Toothbruth? Dry trousers? Booze? Girlfriend? Groping around in the dark will take ages. As with many other areas of modern life – finding your way down the stairs of a strange house springs immediately to mind – this uncertainty is instantly dispelled by a random stab at your keypad and the resulting glow of LCD illumination from your keypad…

Ah. There she is.

3. Disgusting video clips

I suspect that, on Saturday morning of last week, quite a large proportion of the adult UK population awoke to find a video-clip, on their mobile, detailing – as only filmed imaged can – the pure, whole, complete and enormously lurid documentary of the toilets at Glastonbury.

If you were one of the lucky ones you merely would’ve been sent a clip of the general area, row upon row of Technicolor Polyjohns stood sentinel, like plastic Daleks queuing at the post office. Those less lucky would have clips displaying just how disgustingly muddy everything was (the whole effect reminded me rather of my student days, when for some reason a flatmate decided to melt a Cadbury’s crème egg in our electric kettle).

Those least lucky of all will have been sent a clip of the patty-men emptying the toilets, with their disease-dripping machines that trundle round the site looking like the bastard lovechild of an oil-tanker and a vacuum-cleaner. I’ve heard their mating call, the choking, sucking, liquid schlurping that they kick out when they’re vacuuming all the poo up.

Always reminds me of a kid at McDonalds, trying to hoover in the last of his chocolate milkshake.

4. All wings report in

How did people do this in the past? How? You’re with a group of friends, say, six of you, for the sake of argument. You’re leaving from different parts of the country. How would you know which Little Theft to meet up in on the way down? How would you be able to take pictures of Eddie mooning at a random lorry-driver from the passenger seat of his Focus? (we’ve all got a friend like Eddie, haven’t we…). More to the point, how would you find each other in the midst of 175,000 others? How would Pete Docherty’s handlers find which hedge to pull him out of? How would you call your mother, and say “Mother, I appear to have lost an important part of my brain, somewhere, somewhere in a field in Somerset?”. Alright.

5. As a weapon

James Bond, memorably, once used his mobile to jack 50,000 volts into the brain-pan of a villain who was about to shoot him. You know - it was the one with Terri Hatcher in, looking stupid. Anyway, that’s complete overkill. Modern handsets, due in part to their weight-balance and streamlined design but mostly due to the density of the lithium in their batteries actually make superb throwing weapons. A decent overarm hurl will quite easily stove in the face of most unarmoured assailants and, more importantly, in a festival context, will also signal to the idiot that keeps treading on your toes that you are displeased with him.

In fact, I would go as far to say that mobile handsets are the very zenith of mans efforts to make the perfect throwing weapon - after all, you can’t telephone a javelin to see where it is when you’ve lost it down the back of your sofa.

6. As a personal assistant

Glastonbury is complicated. Naive debutantes consider it to be merely some people sat around in a field with some bands on. The logistics of it, though, are fiendish. What stage is your favourite band on? Where is that? How best do you fight your way through the bovine crowds to get there? Who do you want to see after them, and what stage are that lot on? When do you have to leave so you don’t miss the start? What time does everyone want to hit that noodle place we liked so much? Where do we have to bail Eddie out from after he mooned that policeman?

It’s all so very confusing.

In recent years the Guardian has been very considerate and has given everyone, in their welcome-packs, a tiny, weeny little booklet that lists, in tables, what’s going on. Alas, though, this comes with an itsy-bitsy plastic pouch to put it in. This plastic pouch, in wet years, serves not to keep the guide clean but instead to drown it in rainwater, leading to the oft-seen sight of people trying to forensically dissect the papier-mâché schedule like a particularly feckless archaeologist.

But! Just punch the details into your handset, in the form of reminders, and Bob’s your mother’s brother…

7. As a financial deposit

All of my cash-money having been spent on lager & falafels, I was forced to give my Razr to a toilet-roll salesman in return for a hundred sheets of finest Charmin. On the upside, it had only been my Razr for half an hour; I’d found it lying in a puddle. Tee hee!

The authorities were kind enough, by the way, to have issued us all with our very own roll of green, bleach-free, earth-friendly toilet roll upon arrival. I used mine to mummify some random interloper who crashed through our camp at 3am…

8. As a hippy lure

You can say a lot about our crusty friends; you can say what a lot of tosh all that “crystal healing” nonsense is. You can say that they’re idiots for believing in the goodness of ley-lines and the badness of cellular radiation. You can say they smell so profoundly bad that, should they ever find themselves in an airport, all the poor sniffer-dogs in Customs would simultaneously be taking medical retirement. You can say all of this, but I won’t, since my own dear mother is a hippy.

What you can say about them is that they do dress sensibly. Those woven-goat-hair capes they sport around their knife-narrow shoulders, for example, are bloody warm. I decided to obtain one.

I waited until a likely-looking fellow had dosed himself up on mushrooms; out came my mobile, with a kaleidoscopic screensaver selected. I pressed it into his numb, herb-smelling hands and, whilst he tried to see infinity, I sliced away the reed girdle that secured his cloak and then, pausing only to pluck my handset back, made off.

It would’ve been the perfect crime, had it not been infested with stoned lice.

9. As a smuggling device

Prise the back off, pocket the battery and you have a handy little cavern to stow those things that the police would disapprove of. What? Where else am I going to hide my “I Love the Human Rights Act” badge…?

10. Because you make so many bloody friends

You do. There’s only one other time of your life when you make so many lasting friends so quickly, and that’s the first night you spend in prison. You’re in a giant party for four or five days and it’s impossible not to meet people - those you camp near become instant mates if only because you’re bonded with the Dunkirk spirit of staying alive, and sane, and in as good a humour as possible, when you’re soaked and saturated and generally utterly clagged in mud.

Just be sure to take a quick snap of everyone, if only so that you can remember their names when you get back home and sober up. You’ll remember the name of the girl you were really into, of course, but what was the name of that idiot that kept mooning everyone…?

Ben Harvey returns this week clutching his big book of Sunrise Times after dancing with the druids at Stonehenge.

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So, anyway, there I was, stood in a crowd of ten thousand hippies at four in the morning, all of us assembled just to watch the sun come up. I’m sure you’ve all done something similar, right? But of course you have. Ambling down to Stonehenge on the longest day of the year is something of a tradition for me, since it does happen to be my birthday and because there are worse ways to start celebrating than sucking down a can or two of the local mushroom-cider.

Anyway, me and my friends are assembled in the midst of all the bongo-playing, tie-die clad masses, everyone wearing either high-end waterproof Gore-Tex (local rich people, having brought little Tarquin along for a bit of culture) or low-end bin-bags to keep the rain off (local crusty hippies, whose own children have had quite enough culture in their short lives and are ignoring the spectacle in order to better mug Tarquin’s PSP off him when his parents aren’t looking).

In amongst this strange fashion parade bobs the occasional high-viz jacket of an English Heritage steward, fussing around and petulantly asking people not to please carve “George Bush Is A Twunt” on the 5000 year-old stones with their camper-van keys. And, just because I know some of you will ask, I personally was wearing the set of army-surplus fatigues I always wear on occasions when I know I’m going to get filthy, such as Stonehenge, music festivals or my bi-yearly attempts to do the washing-up.

The point of all of this, by the way, is not to sneer at either the Barbour-wearing locals or the itinerant dogs-on-string brigade but to relate to you good readers, you fine worthies of SMS Text News, what happened when the druids finally consulted with their clocks, with gods and with their Big Book of Sunrise Times and announced that the sun had indeed risen on this, the Summer Solstice. They had to announce it, you see, because nobody could see the bloody thing, it being inconveniently cloudy. And that’s when half the people there started going bananas and that’s when the other half took their mobiles out and started taking photographs and video-clips of them.

It was quite, quite peculiar. All of a sudden you’re surrounded by hundreds of people instantly punching their right hands in the air (it must’ve been like this when Hitler got to an interesting point in one of his little speeches), each of them clutching a handset and bathing these monolithic monoliths not, as intended, with the burning glare of a worship-worthy sun but instead with the milky-white glow of a thousand LCD screens. Flashes popped and strobed all around the place – I felt how Britney Spears must feel when she gets out of a car and suddenly remembers that she’s forgotten to put her pants on.

The more I think about it this the less it becomes a remarkable thing. I was initially taken aback by the irony of it all; vast herds of humans turning up to celebrate something as simple and primal as the sunrise - tied to this location by nothing more than a few dozen slabs of rock - juxtaposed with the fact that they choose to record it with the highly-advanced little digital television cameras that they happen to carry around in their pockets. Instead of dancing around to the medieval rhythms of drums and trumpets and didgeridoos a lot of the people were getting filthy looks because of their idiot ring-tones (“Hello? Matt? Why did you just send me a video clip of some pissed tramp on a boulder? Don’t you know what time it is? It’s four in the bloody morning!”).

The offensively-surreal nature of the scene faded when I realised that this has been happening for years. Every music concert I’ve been to in the last three or four years has had people waving, above their heads, not cigarette lighters but camera-phones. Every news website has a graphicanddeliciouslybloodymobilefootage@ouremail.com address you can send things to. Every drunken punch-up in the high-street at kicking-out time has, of course, a girl screaming “He’s not worf it, Keef! He’s not worf it!” but also, these days, one of Keef’s mates videoing everything in case it goes to court.

The ubiquitousness of it all does make me chuckle – for so many years now we’ve had journalists and politicians harp on about “Big Brother Britain”, extolling the facts and stats that we have more CCTV than any nation in the world, that we’re caught on camera five hundred times a day (though, obviously, this isn’t enough for Paris Hilton or John Leslie) and all the other civil-liberty infringement business. The fact that we all quite happily cart around a CCTV camera in our jackets or handbags seems to have escaped them somehow…

What does concern me – almost enough to write an article about it, come to think of it – is what happens when something bad happens. I’m not talking about the privacy-rights of some coked-up celebrity falling over in the street but I am growing increasingly worried about car accidents, about deaths, about those solemn occasions when you really, really, really should show a little respect. Quite an outdated concept these days, isn’t it? Funerals. Fatalities. Suffering. All those shocking times when people are vulnerable, when their shields are down. Being British, you could argue that there’s a natural predilection to be demure at such times, to show that respect, to actually be sympathetic in your actions but – and prepare yourselves, because I’m about to toss a vaguely serious question at you – do you find that mobiles actually seem exempt from this?

What I’m trying to ask is this – we’ve all seen things in passing that grab our attention, like fights, like accidents. We rubber-neck at them because we’re human, and that’s what we do, but where do we draw the line when it comes to recording them? This is an argument that I’ve not seen taking place anywhere – nowhere in the broadsheets or the chat-shows have they yet asked where our new-found obsession with recording things on the fly goes from interested-documentation into insensitive-insult.

Another question to toss to you – it’s blatantly not the place for the mobile industry to tell people what they can or can’t video or photograph anymore than it’s the industry’s place to tell them what they can or can’t talk about. So who should? Where are we taking our moral guidance from on this issue? Or is all of this lingering doubt on manners and the decline of our Great British National Values just part of me turning 27?

Answers on a postcard. If you can be arsed, tell me – use the snazzy Comment function on here to share any opinions you’ve got; has you ever seen anyone video anything you think they shouldn’t have? Do you think it’s too much too soon, or just the logical conclusion of letting millions of people loose with cameras? Does any of this footage deserve to be documented and celebrated anywhere other than YouTube? Should we set up a fund to buy Little Tarquin a new PSP?

Like I say: answers on a postcard…

Ben Harvey returns with his weekly Friday afternoon column - and this week he’s looking into his crystal ball and making some predictions for the future.

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Looking back through the history of mobile telephony always reminds me of those terribly clichéd film montages of time-travel; you know the ones – pages fluttering down from calendars. Seasons whirling forward at the blink of an eye, with trees squirting up from the ground and with the hands of clocks whirling around like rotorblades. It’s all happened so very, very fast. And, were I not the incredibly bright and capable young man that I am, I should be quite intimidated by the speed of such change.

To recap, we’ve gone from using cinderblock-sized walkie-talkies (useful in an area of London about the size of an urban-fox’s piss-marking territory) to the current state of play, when we’re blatting music & video files around to our friends all across the world on handsets the size of a Toffee Crisp.

However – it’s always easier to look back in time than it is to look forwards; hindsight, as we all know, is easy. This is why your history teacher at school found it so hard to impress women. It’s also why Mystic Meg never buys lottery tickets. So – I’m going to stake my reputation on the line here and make some bold predictions. Some of these are wild stabs in the dark, others have been painstakingly assembled, the bricks of logic carefully tamped with the sticky mortar of intuition. Or something.

Anyway, here we go, listed in nothing by a rough chronological order…

Handsets will get no smaller, just heavier

Ben Elton, as a stand-up comic, has a lot of faults; he’s been using the same routine for fifteen years, for starters. Dressing like he mans reception in a Job Centre doesn’t endear him to us much, either. However, in his other guise as a novelist he did once make his own prediction about the future, which is that technology can only shrink down to a certain level before you start losing your computer-keyboard down the back of your sofa cushions, or accidentally put your stereo through the washing-machine because you left it in your trousers. He’s quite right – certain technologies have to have a minimum size because, even though they could be far smaller, you’d never be able to find the bloody things.

Look at memory-sticks, which have to be at least the size of a stamp; otherwise you’d need tweezers to get them in or out of your camera. Look at iPod shuffles; miniscule things. Again, they could be far smaller but the size of the buttons on the frontage dictates a maximum size (you flick the on/off switch with your fingernail as it is). As long as human beings are using their fingers to operate technology you’ll always be constrained to a minimum size for any tech appliance. A case in point were those calculator-watches that you needed a sharp pencil to use. Classy.

Handsets are exactly the same. Even current models are forced to sprout buttons and switches on three or four of the six sides available; routing everything through a touchscreen, á la iPhone, won’t help, because, again, the fat, greasy, sausage-like digits of the average person mean that things can’t be any smaller, styli being about as popular with the general public as Michael Barrymore at a pool-cleaner convention.

One thing that manufacturers of handsets will have to keep an eye on, though, is density. Because although mobiles aren’t going to get any smaller, they’re certainly going to get heavier. Cameras will have more sophisticated lenses. Batteries will become more compact, more powerful (Fuel Cells being a subject for a future article – but in the meantime…) and speakers gain more and more clarity and ooomph. The upshot of this is that your average handset, in five or six years, will be so dense that it may as well be made out of lead.

This in turn will have side-effects – braces on men will make a sartorial comeback, since your trousers will instantly be pulled to ankle-level under the tonnage of your mobile. Women will have to have to rent Sherpas to carry their handbags, or perhaps pull them around on cute little trolleys. Also, instead of calling a hitman to whack someone that you dislike you could always just batter them to death with the phone itself.

Reducing Carbon Footprints will be important for about thirty seconds

They’ve recently started banging on about how damaging to the environment the IT industry is. And I think they’re quite right – not in terms of global-warming, or using the world’s resources to make PCs you throw away after three years, but more the damage to the water table that all the world’s IT consultants, programmers & engineers do every weekend when they get hammered & wee in inappropriate places whilst waiting for their taxis.

However, much in the same way that Saint Geldof of Bob jumps, hand in hand with Bono, onto every passing political bandwagon it must also be the case that the guns of the environmentalists will be trained, sooner or later, on the mobile industry. Admittedly, we have been treating the atmosphere to radiowave-bukakke for twenty years and, yes, egging various African civil-wars on (so that we can steal all their lovely lithium) could be seen, by unfavourable eyes, as not being in the best traditions of honour & good sportsmanship.

Anyway – when we have a thankfully brief period of biodiesel-fueled, wicker-cased handsets, don’t worry. Like all environmental fads, it will last just as long is takes everyone to become happily blasé, and then we can all revert to our ivory-clad Motorolas. You know. The ones with the seal-pup leather finish.

Integration into Everything

Cash is dying on its arse. In 2004 in the UK, for example, card purchases outweighed cash purchases for the first time in all retail sales (figures weighted to exclude cocaine & stripper-rental) and has been falling steadily ever since. Governments across the world are quietly putting the feelers out to fund studies into totally cashless economies, partly to track money-laundering & crime, and partly to stop counterfeiting, but mostly because money costs so much. Printing all those notes. Smelting all those coins. Holding all those focus-groups to decide who goes on the next £20 note (Sir Bob of Geldof, anyone…?), it’s all such a bloody expensive process. The sooner we can be rid of the folding paper-stuff and slap it all on an ethereal data carriage of some sort, the better and that, my friends, is where the phone will come in.

People talk a good game when it comes to “convergence”, and it does seem a bit of a far-off concept, but it’s an inevitability. For example, now that cameraphone picture-quality is now – officially - uncrap, the digital camera will increasingly be sidelined into a specialist product for photographers. The next generation of handsets & bandwidth options (including the next gen. of GPRS, whenever they decide to pull their heads out of their backsides) will bump Blackberrys (or is that Blackberries?) firmly into obscurity; you watch what happens to Blackberry unit sales when the iPhone comes out.

So; where am I going with this? What I’m saying is that, as financial transactions move more and more into a realm where they become pure data then they’re going to need a device to go with them capable of encryption tasks. And it’s not going to be all that long before we start to see respectable computing power in handsets, when you think about it. Email, internet, data storage, VOIP calls, TVOIP, probably even some bastardised ID-card nonsense, too.

…which leads us nicely onto…

Your phone will not be a phone anymore

It’s a good word, isn’t it? Fone. What is that, one and a half syllables? It’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s everything. Everything except accurate, because it’ll be completely wrong in a very short period of time. It says that it’s a phone, not a wallet. It calling it your phone, not your node to the internet, to your email, to your own data and to the codes you need to start your car or open your front-door. It’s denoting something that’s just a telephone, not your entire world.

So, when people do start to re-name that dense, blinking lump of technological potential they’ll probably call it something crappy and generically sci-fi, like a “link” or a “slab” or a “unit”. If I try and stake a claim on immortality, and suggest that they call it a “Harvey”, do you think anyone will notice…?

…I mean, do I have to write a note to the UN, or what…?

Inflammatory Mr Ben Harvey returns this week with a look at uber-popular reality show, Big Brother. The eigth series begun on Wednesday (you can get the whole shebang at www.channel4.com/bigbrother/. There’s always been speculation about housemates with secret mobile phone stashes, so Ben’s given the issue a bit of Friday afternoon treatment.

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This week sees the launch of the yearly Freak Parade – for the next seventy or so weeks, Big Brother will dominate the British TV schedules, sucking the life out of our nation like some ravenous cultural tapeworm. Now, because SMS Text News is very popular with people from all across the world, I should take a moment to explain the basic concept of the show: twenty people enter a house, only one leaves alive. It’s like Highlander, but with more swords and a louder Queen.

One of the central tenets of BB is that those on the inside should have no contact with those on the outside. Rather like the Truman Show, really, except that the acting’s worse. Every year sees two things happen in BB; the first is that something nasty will happen on the outside world and the broadsheet media will wring its hands about whether or not the inmates should be told (a contestants’ father having a heart-attack, cretins riding the Tube network with semtex waistcoats, whatever). The second tradition is that the tabloid media will pull stunts to actually communicate with the housemates, such as catapulting walkie-talkies into the house’s garden, or playing subliminal messages in the hypersonic frequencies, thus causing Jack Dee to go mad and flee.

Now, this has perplexed me a little, because, given that the Great Unwashed has always had an insatiable, insane need to know more about the inmates (right up, that is, until they actually get out. Then the nation does the equivalent of waiting until they’ve fallen asleep, deleting our telephone number from their phone and then catching the night-bus home) and it’s not as if an eight-foot wall and a couple of puffy security-guards is that troublesome an obstacle to overcome. The over-riding golden rule of all of this is that the inmates in Big Brother do not have access to telephones.

But why not? Human history is full of instances when small groups of people are isolated physically but allowed to chat over the airwaves. Astronaunts, Biospherians, even nuclear submariners when they have to phone their girlfriends to explain that a certain rash, caught in Bangkok, might actually be more than an allergic reaction to talcum-powder, and a fatally infectious one at that. So, to find out why mobiles were really banned, I placed an imaginary call to Endemol’s PR department, and their answerphone gave me the following reasons…

1. Carphone Warehouse isn’t sponsoring it anymore, so there’s no financial motive for the show’s producers. Contestants are told whether or not they’re going in only two weeks before the show starts, and are instantly quarantined from the outside world in halfway-houses. This used to be to stop them selling their stories to the press before they even entered the house but, in these less innocent times, it’s actually more to do with them not getting the Nike or Apple logo tattooed onto their foreheads. After all, if anyone’s going to get ad revenue it’s bloody-well going to be Channel 4.

2. The producers have enough trouble stopping the sex-mad contestants taking matters into their own hands as it is – there was even talk about banning bottles last year. So, letting them take vibrating tools into the house just isn’t on the agenda. At least, not until week 8, when the ratings have gone down the toilet.

3. They bitch and gossip and back-bite quite enough as it is, thankyouverymuch. Letting them text each other really won’t help.

4. How will the Welsh one top-up her credit?

5. Unfortunately, the production crew use radios that broadcast out on the same ranges as mobiles. Imagine the twins, Sam & Amanda, in a conference-call to their literary agent (their new book, “Exhistential Nihlism – Kant and the Philology of Certitude” is out next year, apparently), when they hear the following:

“Camera 8, this is control, go for Sam’s cleavage, please, over?”

“Control, this is 8 – no problem. Panning in. Sorry - which one’s Sam?”

“8, Control here, it’s the idiot blonde one.”

“Roger, Control. Thanks. Not getting much in the way of nipple-shadow here. Can you ask Environment to turn the temperature down a bit?”

…it’s a nightmare waiting to happen, isn’t it. They’d be outraged at the insult to their deeply-held feminist convictions and would riot. Endemol would be forced to tear-gas their own show, and then, in the confusion, one of the contestants would crash a yacht into the side of the enormous dome that the show is contained in and escape. Or am I getting my cultural references confused again? Oh dear.

Anyway, ex-inmates of the house have said that the nicest experience of the whole drama is when they’ve left, when they’ve done the press-conference, when they’ve done the interviews with the Sun to “set the record straight”, when they’ve actually gotten home and turned on the handset they’ve not actually seen for three months. Belated texts received by their phones, hundreds of miles away from their dippy, fame-seeking owners, include such gems as:

+++OMG OMG YORE ON THE TELLY TURN ON THE TELLY YORE ON IT!+++

+++Jack, Jack, it’s your wife. Where are you?+++

+++This is a Detective Nigel Skinner. Please present yourself to a police station as soon as you can. Also, bring a lawyer+++

+++Fancy a pint after work? Oh. Shit.+++

+++Shell is SUCH a bitch. Just punch her when no-one’s looking+++

+++It’s Nick Griffin here, from the BNP. Look, can you wind your neck in a bit? You’re giving the rest of us a bad name. Thanks!+++

…I’m actually beginning to see the logic behind their decision…

Ben Harvey returns for another observation for a Friday afternoon, fresh from a week of relaxation in Portugal.

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They say that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone – mostly, this is true, especially in the areas of money & being happy with your own body. However, it really stands out, of course, when you detach yourself from all your links, all your connections with friends and colleagues and business and go on holiday. And then don’t like it.

I’ve just returned from a week away in Portugal and I am incredibly, incredibly glad to be back. The relief, as the wheels of the plane kissed down onto this green & pleasant land (at least, as pleasant & green as Heathrow can be. Duty-free absinthe springs to mind, for some reason) was incredible – it rose off me like steam. I’m not a nervous flyer, even when storm-fronts over Spain kicked our little flying tube around the sky and flung my poor gin everywhere, but I did get the feeling that the crap, wonky technology upon which Portugal relies may have somehow infected even the hallowed, proud vehicles of British Airways.

Don’t get me wrong. Portugal has a plethora of smashing things about it, and the people there are embarrassingly friendly, but the same laissez-faire attitude that defines the relaxed, sociable, three-hour lunch-break culture is a total anathema to two things; business & technology. It’s telling that a country that receives whopping subsidies to spunk on everything else (building pointless motorways, stealing all our fish…) has a still-dormant telecoms market that’s totally dependent on foreign providers. Not even its own government wants to throw money away on communications, and that’s saying something.

All of this got me thinking – recently, our own market here in the UK seems to have taken the tiniest of pauses, a quick breather, just to catch up with itself. The relentless push from providers & retailers, unbroken now for a decade, for better handsets, better packages and the general rabid-pace of weaving services into every new gadget, laptop and media-device has led – quite naturally – to a certain plateau. It’s not a mid-life crisis, because (in my unhumble opinion) the industry is, relatively, in its early twenties; but it does share certain similarities in terms of wanting to make sure it’s in a place, a state that it actually wants to be in.

This self-awareness, snapping as it does across an entire industry simultaneously, is as rare as a rocking-horse turd, and so we should savour it. It’s the equivalent of those charming football matches they used to have at Christmas in the trenches of World War One; a time to catch up with friends and not feel too pressured by your competitors, and have a bit of a snigger at the Italians as they feel the repercussions of attempting slide-tackles in a minefield.

However, before you know it this brittle, short-lived bubble of calm will burst and it will be back to the status quo of relentless development, of non-stop rivalry and the buzzing - albeit breathless - rush of life at the bleeding-edge of business which, let’s face it, is why you read this website in the first place. But, bloody hell, isn’t that preferable to the alternatives? We’re privileged, as it were, to work where we do and to do what we do. My reasons are as follows:

Exhibit A: Portugal

There’s a reason why you never hear about network executives hurling themselves in desperate despair out of their windows when they fail to make sufficient headway in this territory – it’s because none of the networks give the faintest of shits. I must admit to being staggered that this country has landlines, let alone the Star-Trek level of underlying technology to be able to send a text-message. I saw no shortcodes on adverts. I saw no media streamed between people in streets or in bars or in offices. The entire nation was bereft of BlackBerry and the only bluetooth available was a type of chewing-gum. But they’ve got great coffee, though, so…you know. That’s OK..

Exhibit B: Japan

There’s a reason why you never hear about network executives hurling themselves out of the windows in Japan, too; they find ritual disembowelment to be rather more effective, in times of corporate disappointment. Japan, as you’re no doubt aware, is so far ahead of us in terms of mobile usage, capacity & capability that it’s not even funny. A full and rather more useful essay on Nipponese telephonic culture will be forthcoming just as soon as I’m able to squeeze Ewan for the cost of the air-fare, but needless to say it’s roughly comparable, market to market, as our car industry is to theirs. The upside, of course, to being second-place in terms of turnover & innovation is that we don’t have to listen to the happy mewls of Hello Kitty handsets which is, as I think you’ll agree, a small price to pay.

Thus: in conclusion, I’m glad to be back in the UK if only because we’ve got the balance right; we’re pushing all fronts forwards but not so fast we’re over-extending. The Great Unwashed are still hungry for newer, better kit. Everything, basically, is respectable. Where else, really, would you rather be working…?

Anyway. Enough patriotic flag-waving. I must leave you now – I’m off to the Chinese embassy to get a work permit.

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Hilarious stuff, thanks Ben!

After talking about his experience with mobile phone retailers last week, SMS Text News reader Ben Harvey is back with a little Friday afternoon entertainment. Just don’t ask him about his day…

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I’m having one of those days. Like it or not, you and your mobile are partners and, like an old, married couple, one of you wears the trousers in the relationship and the other one merely pays for everything. And I’m afraid to break this to you, but you’re not the one who has to worry about catching his dong in his zip.

I’m having one of those days. A day that’s hit me with a nasty mix of bugs and idiots, all channelled through my handset like ghosts through a ouija-board.  Bugs can, of course, be anything; your handset won’t synch with your laptop. The router at Caffé Nero needs to be reset but the work-experience boy behind the counter doesn’t know how to do it, so instead of happily sniggering at The Register whilst drinking your coffee you’re stuck trying to decrypt that one Italian tabloid that’s always left in the bloody paper-rack.

…we’ve all been there…

Idiots, on the other hand, should be avoidable, but they always manage to pester and annoy – the call-centre agent ringing “to see if you’re happy with your package”. Some anonymous spiv on the make who spams you with business cards simply because you’re at the same meeting as him and he now wants you in his “human web”. Or – and call me old-fashioned, here – you just have a bad phone call, one which terminates with you flinging your phone at the wall and screaming “well, f*** you then!”.

…I mean, seriously, the Samaritans aren’t what they used to be…

I’m having one of THOSE days, a mix of technology not doing what it’s designed to, of people not doing what they’re supposed to and life – at least, that portion of it pumped through fibre-optics truck cabling, a mast or two and thence into my delicate little ear-hole – isn’t going quite according to plan. You look down at your handset, you feel the weight of it in your hand and think…I wish I could be rid of you. Just for a day.

But there’s an old saying. Beware of what you wish for.

This is a big ask, but I’m going to imagine, now, that that wish came true. Imagine a world without your mobile. It’s such a vital, vital thing to so many of us now that it’s hard to re-adjust your head to a time – before 3G, before colour LCDs, before text messaging, before the car-phone – when the only calls you could make were from chunky lumps of plastic that lurked on your desk and had a curly wire stuck up their arse.

What is it…say, fifteen years? 180 months of the most phenomenal development that any industry in the history of history has ever, ever seen. People sometimes point at the personal computer as being the prime example of a field that’s undergone incredibly swift progress; they’ll mutter things about the internet and then round off their argument with Moore’s Law, that twee, soundbitish little maxim that computing power doubles every eighteen months.

Well, I’m going to introduce you to Harvey’s Law. This is an equally twee maxim that the indispensability of your mobile – in whatever form it takes – doubles every twelve months. I have to put my hand up at this point and admit that this isn’t the first time I’ve named something after myself, Harvey’s Law joining a few other inventions (notably a modified vodka martini called Harvey’s Sugar Thermometer. It’s got jam in, you’d love it), but my point stands; again, imagine a world where you are – quite literally – tied to the telecoms network through woven strands of copper. How primitive.

Think back. Can you remember business without mobiles? It was hideous. The minute someone went more than ten meters from their desk they might as well have been on the moon. Not just for obvious derelictions of duty, like attending a meeting or driving down to a different office or branch, but even for popping out for a sandwich, for a cigarette, for a piss. Now, you can get in touch with someone in roughly four or five tiny flips of your thumb. Then –  such a long time ago – then it was a nightmarish game of telephone-tag between your secretaries. A mere ten years later (people used to call that length of time a decade, by the way. Now it’s known as a Tony) and we’re all connected through the cellular network, through the air, with secretaries now relegated to the dustbin of history, along with answering machines, cassette-tape, Ministerial Responsibility and yo-yos.

Think back. The way we socialise now is different, better, faster, more liquid. Something as simple as popping out for a drink now is ripe with possibilities – ten seconds of texting another friend, then another, to entice them out often, for example, leads to the best, most enjoyable evenings. This spontaneity is priceless. Before mobiles? You’d spend half an hour organising a handful of people to meet up. Didn’t previous generations have anything better to do with their time…?

Think back. Romance. I used to envision Victorian England to be the most hazard-fraught time to start dating – should you manage to actually get an evening alone with the object of your affections, after dodging her angry father & evading her psychotic chaperone, then you run the risk of getting fatally impaled on a shard of whalebone as you’re trying to get her bra off. But now, now I find it incredibly hard to even start to put myself in the situation of not having a mobile – it’s not just the little things (you’re in a bar, you get a girl’s number. But no phone! What do you note it down on?) but it’s critical to every stage of a relationship these days; from the opening texts, increasing in flirtyness until a date’s arranged. And then the date itself – imagine trying to meet up in anywhere in, say, Zone 1 when you can’t drop a quick voicemail to tell them that you’ll be late, or that you can’t work out just which Starbucks they actually meant, or that you can’t come at all because you’ve found someone prettier.

I actually get sent that last one a lot.

I say all of this not to harp on about why your mobile is great, or how lucky you are to have it, or just how clever you are to belong to an industry that’s advancing far faster than the bovine throngs can keep up with – I’m saying all this because, on the sort of day that I’m having, these thoughts might stop you from taking a handset-shaped chunk out of the plaster. Because, on such a day, the very last thing you need is to talk to gum-chewing Donna in Insurance Team 6.
There is, of course, one final reason why it’d be a bad idea to turn the clock back a Tony – you’d have to explain to your grandmother, again, just what a “mobile phone” was.

“That’s very modern, deary. I bet it needs a lot of wire…”

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Thanks Ben!

SMS Text News reader, Ben Harvey, documents the seven deadly sins of mobile retail sales. Can you recognise them?

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I do love going into mobile phone outlets on the high-street. The same alluring smells that float out of your favourite restaurant, of your favourite car, the smells that relax you? Well, for me, it’s that combined stink of hair-gel and desperation that I most savour when shopping for handsets. Makes me feel at home.

“Can I help you…sir?”

Every time I hear that I love it. That first line, that opener, that oyster-knife into your wallet. Every time I hear it I can’t help but think of the wood behind the spear, the lessons that the sales staff must’ve had in Travelodges, sat in drone-rows, chugging back dinky bottles of Buxton whilst some dispirited Regional Training Leader (or whatever the poor sap happens to have on his CV. Whatever their job title is now you can reasonably sure that it wasn’t also the subject of “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up By Brett Edgby Aged Seven”) uses Blairish hand-gestures whilst telling them how to flog contracts.

It’s a cliché, but there really are seven deadly sins to the world of face-to-face mobile sales. If you’re lucky I might one day write the flipside, the ten commandments, but for now, here’s where every single network is getting it wrong…

1. Hair gel
I’m not sure why this is, but every commission-chasing eijit with a name-badge and a sneer also comes complete with a barnet coated in product. The only rational explanation for this universal marker is perhaps that – like Foxtons staff all singing the National Anthem at the start of the working day (the roiling tide of patriotism takes the edge off of conspiring with their buyers’ financial advisers, apparently) – all the boys in these stores line up in front of a communal mirror at 08:55am and have a bonding session over the Fudge.

2. Have a really tiny shop
This is a classic. The retail outlets that people find indispensable – Boots, Marks & Spencer, Anne Summers – have enormous stores. Lavish amounts of square-footage, sat squatly in High Streets all over this green and pleasant land. Yet a lot of the network stores you see are tiny – just about as wide as the shop banner over the front door. The price of retail property can’t be that much of a factor, given the Big Four’s predilection for haemorrhaging cash like it was going out of style. The reason, dear reader, for the fact that some network stores are so small is that they’re only really ever stocking two (2) handsets that they actually want to sell you. One will be designed by Italians and then encrusted with heroin-coated diamonds, one sale of which will earn your sales-monkey enough commission to get slotted on Jägermeister every day for a month. The other handset is the new-but-cheap model that they want to sell lots of, to paupers. And you don’t really need a huge number of aisles for that approach, now, do you.

3. Suits and boots
Again, it’s a mystery why the retail staff of every mobile phone shop you go into are dressed like the bastard offspring of Reggie Cray and his letting agent. Suits so new that, in their breast pockets, you can still see the outline of that little packet of buttons that Moss Bros. kindly supplied them, like the condom poking a ring on one side of their wallets. Both smack slightly of unworldlyness and are bound to result, one day, in a feckless boy getting confused and sewing himself into his Durex. Playing devil’s advocate, though, you do have to have new suits if you’re in that line of trade, if only because you’re going through puberty and as such the length of your arms and legs changes on a weekly basis.

4. Crazy, crazy marketing
Brilliant. In this day and age, now that we have no market-breaking economic slumps, no society-collapsing pandemics and no cataclysmic World Wars we only, apparently, have one thing left to put backbone in our young men, to fortify them with pluck and character and doughy John Bull toughness. And that is to put them in a costume, on the pavement, with a stack of flyers in their hands and desperation in their blood. An undeniable rule of business is that good product sells itself – it doesn’t need Jamiroquai playing a concert on a 747.

…that, by the way, was an opportunity missed – next time, PR boys, don’t give the plane as much fuel as it needs to get across the Atlantic. Imagine the column-inches then…

5. Be a shit
“Hello” says the frazzled mother, out shopping on a rainy Tuesday. “I just need some more texts so I can keep in contact with Daryl, my youngest, whilst he’s in Borstal”. Now, we’ve all seen it, but there is no word in the English language to truly describe the expression that passes over the face of your common-or-garden sales boy when he hears something like that. It’s the look of someone who finds an unaccountable twenty-pound note in their pocket when doing the laundry. The look of a Manchester United fan when Evra punched the 7th goal in against a pack of feckless Italians (and the crowd started chanting “are you City in disguise?”). The look on George W. Bushes’ face when they let him stay up late to watch Sesame Street – mix those three together and you’ll see that epiphany of potential, that almost loving look they give an idiot about to be parted from their money.

6. If you’re a store manager, be a bigger shit
Five words: Alec, Baldwin, Glengarry, Glen, Ross.

7. Would you like fries with that?
Upsell. Someone walks into your shop wanting a new handset on a cheap contract; you bolt on, throw in or barter some minutes, some texts, some bandwidth, even one of those faux-leather & Perspex sheaths (that, for some reason, always scream “socks with sandals”). Anything, anything, so long as it increases the cash, that feeds that sacred turnover. Why they do this with phones but not with other products, other industries, is beyond me. How long before your builder gets infected? “Would you like a shed with that?”. Or your local vicar; “How about we sign you up for Buddhism, too? Just in case you roam in a country with patchy Christian coverage”. Buy one, get one free? Bog off…

…and they wonder why so many packages are being sold over the internet these days; perhaps it’s something to do with not hearing any sniggering from the back of the store as you punch in your PIN. But there we go. Never mind; don’t let them make you angry. Don’t show bitterness or impatience to these weak and credulous creatures. Just think - next time you’re stood in a store, asking something vaguely technical and being answered with blank-eyed incomprehension – just think; what else could they be doing…?

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Fantastic! Thank you for sending that in, Ben!