June 21, 2010
By Peter van der Merwe

I remember my first cellphone well. It was a Nokia 1611. The size of a paving stone, and only fractionally more functionality. As a stay-at-home dad doing some freelance writing on the side, I would check it frequently, hoping it would ring. Which it didn’t. Not very often, anyway.

That was back in 1995. Ah, those were the days. People would sit in coffee shops talking loudly and self-importantly on their shiny new cellphones. Then their phones would ring in the middle of their “conversation”, and they would slink off miserably, raucous laughter ringing in their ears.

Size notwithstanding, my Nokia 1611 was a great phone, until my son’s pet rodent escaped and ate half the keys. But that’s another story.

My wife was openly derisive of my cellphone. She’d never get one of those things, she declared. Until her company gave her one — the Nokia 8810 “banana phone”, no less. I was deeply envious. She was smug. Until she drove over it with her car, anyway. But that, too, is another story.

So what would I get next? My service provider – clue: Yebo, Gogo – wanted to give me an Ericsson. I wanted the Nokia 9000 Communicator, which opened up to reveal a keyboard, and would establish me in the eyes of the world as a Serious Businessman. I didn’t ever get one, for some reason. I did get an optical disk drive, which was cutting edge storage technology in those days: all 100Mb of it. Woohoo.

What I did get, a few years later, was the Nokia 6310i. To this day, it is one of my favourite phones ever. Slim, attractive, gorgeous. Most importantly, it had the Snake game on it, which, like all good games, was ridiculously addictive.

I may still have been using it, if I didn’t lend it to my stepson, who conveniently forgot to give it back to me before getting on a plane for the UK. The little bugger may still be playing Snake on it, for all I know.

Then I met my new wife. At our first meeting, I fell hopelessly in love with her beautiful eyes. And her utterly gorgeous silver Nokia 8800. It was a heady combination, I tell you. Few strong men can resist the combination of a pretty woman with gadgets. She even likes beer.

So yes, mine is a life measured in gadgets, to some degree.  I love technology. But my real interest is not in the bells and whistles so much as how they’re busy changing our lives in small, but irreversible ways. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Blu-Ray disc player to buy …