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December 25, 2004

We’ve had the feast of the winter solstice again, and it was four days late as usual. Those early Christians must have been astronomically challenged, and as far as I can fathom there’s still a lot of that going around. However, they did keep a few of the better old pagan customs, like eating yourself into a stupor, and exchanging gifts. It’s the choice and exchange of gifts that has been getting my attention this Christmas, there’s so much more great stuff to choose from every year that I hardly know where to start. So here I am, between snacks, finding my way through all the wonderful baubles and goodies I received and wondering which ones I can take back to realize maximum profit.

It’s the new technologies that really get my attention, and I’ll have more to say about that in a future column, but right now I find that cell phones are what really turn my crank. These used to be simply phones, but no more. Now they play music, keep notes and lists of numbers, send email, and even put you on the Internet in colour.

These devices have been going absolutely crazy, and this year you can even get a combination of phone and digital camera. When these first appeared I thought, "The phone people have finally lost it, they will go broke, who wants a phone that takes pictures?" How wrong I was!! These devices have become a real hit, and are selling like mad, I can’t believe it. Contrary to what you might think, these dandy little gadgets rarely take pictures of your ear by mistake, and the pictures they do take aren’t all that bad quality.

Just as a precautionary note, I should add that you have to be careful about taking pictures of ears, since people with different sized ears tend to be more aggressive than symmetric people. This is according to Zeynep Benderlioglu, co-author of a study on the subject published in the Journal of Human Biology. I expect he has outsized ears himself, and with a handle like that I’d be aggressive too. Zeynep Benderlioglu, that’s a name to watch. Watching is about all most people can manage anyhow, there’s no way to pronounce it with any confidence.

Since I was caught flat-footed by the camera phone, I have been watching and planning, and next time I intend to be ahead of the game. I’m tired of being caught up in progress; I want to be the originator of it. So I ask myself, after including cameras with phones, what’s next? What’s going to be the big new development in cell phones? I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I’ve come up with quite a number of possibilities. Let me try a few on you. If I can patent the best choice I can make a bundle.

I’ve noticed that in some buildings and most hospitals you aren’t allowed to use cell phones, you have to go outside with the smokers to use it. So one of my phone ideas is to have a phone with a built-in cigarette case and a lighter, that might go over big with a lot of people. It doesn’t solve the problem in air travel however, you can’t easily step outside for a smoke. So let’s have a phone with a built-in smoke detector detector, so you can go to the washroom, find the smoke detector with your phone, disable it, and have a cigarette in peace.

I’m not a smoker myself, but I pity the poor addicts who are, and want to cater to their weakness, but my ideas don’t end there. What about including a loud hailer in a cell phone. When someone is talking loudly on their phone in a crowded restaurant, you could turn on your loud hailer and boom out something like, "SHUT THE HELL UP, TURKEY". There might be a market for a phone like that. Or when you see someone you know across the street you could use the loud hailer for communication and save the price of a phone call.

There are uses around the home too of course, you could build a TV zapper into a cell phone, and save a lot of problems finding where your partner has left the regular one. Another possibility is to include a toothpick and tweezers in a cell phone, just like in a Swiss Army knife. May as well include a can opener, bottle opener, scissors, and a magnifying glass too I suppose, let’s go all the way.

So there you have the wave of the future, now all I have to do is make the best choices, find an investor, and the world is my oyster. Hey!! May as well include one of those tools for opening oysters while we’re at it. Now there’s a WINNER.

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