Hold On, I'm Putting You On Speaker...

Ever been watching 24, madcap fans, and loved it when Jack's growled "Hold on, I'm putting you on speaker...", along with such famous quotes as "You're on with Bill Buchanan, also present is yada yada, etc. etc." and all the other tech-style talk of CTU Los Angeles?

More to the point, have you ever started reading this blog and thought "I wonder where he's going with this?" Well, this time I'll get straight to it and tell you: I've got a new mobile phone. Normally, technological updates don't bother me. I don't care how much RAM (whatever that is) my laptop has, or if my phone has a 1.2 megapixel camera or an MP3 Player or a washing machine or can tapdance like Bruce Forsythe when I say the word "watermellon"... as with most technology these days, I don't get the point. My dear old phone was the definition of my attitude to modern technology: it made and recieved calls, did texting, had a black-and-white screen and woke me up in the mornings. That's it. Really.

But recently it started to die. Technology, you see, is short-lived. In phone-years, my handset had been collecting what little state pension His Tonyness felt obliged to dole out for several decades. Like many residents of care homes, it forgot numbers, lost messages and switched off without warning. It was a slow, narcoleptic old phone.

It's the January Sales, I'd had enough of missing calls and misplacing directions to parties and low signal in the Bermuda Triangle of phone signal that is my room, and I was in town on the day my loan check arrived. To that end, ladies and mentalmen, I decided it was time to upgrade. But I didn't want anything fancy, oh no. You know what I'm like with new technology. These colour-screen, photo-taking, internet-capable mobile computers confuse me. They switch on and say "Hello Moto!", to which I look confused, thinking it's intelligent enough to speak to me, and answer with a shakey "Hello... how are you?" And then people laugh. So I chat with the nice man in the Orange shop on Northumberland Street. He explains that I am out of touch, that I'm technologically retarded, and that he's been using a 7.8 gig ZX47392 MegaRange GPS Nuclear Satellite Comms Device (from Nokia, no less) since he was three years old. It can make coffee for him in the morning, tie his tie for him (no wonder it looked a mess), shine his shoes for him and order a missile strike on Baghdad in seven different languages.

I tell him, awfully politely, that I don't give a damn. I want a phone that phones people, texts people and (grudgingly) takes pictures, since so many of my hip and with-it friends have camera phones and want to send me pictures all the time. He tells me that I really should sell a kidney and get a brain implant that calls the Moon, but I persist. In true Little Britain style, I pick a cheap(ish), pretty-looking phone and demand that "I want that one."

So I've joined the 21st Century (only took seven years) with a Motorola L6 mobile telecommunications device. It calls people. It sends text messages (even though it tries to type them for me by predicting which word I'll go for... I started typing "Hello..." and it wanted me to put "Help..." which, while summing up my feeling of desperation at the time, was not what I was going for). It takes pictures. It plays games (including 24 and Sonic the Hedgehog). My snazzy new wallpaper background, screensaver and ringtone have all been themed to James Bond. I can say "Hold on, I'm putting you on speaker..." and actually put you on speaker. And above all, I'm not ashamed to get it out in public when asking somebody's number (a feature listed in the catalogue). Overall, I'm quite proud of it.

Astonishingly, I'd recommend that those of you out there who haven't got up-to-date mobile phones should upgrade. I thought I didn't care, but now I'm the owner of a rather pleasing, flashy new gadget (ahem... easy target) I'm loving it, and spending more time with it than on revision, which is a worry. So there we have it, madcap Bonkers fans. Today's message: get with the times! Peace out.