Phones, the web and teamwork

Jul 2 2009 by Adam Maxwell, The Journal

IT HAS recently come to my attention that the size of mobile phones is directly proportional to the proliferation of ‘The A Team’ in popular culture.

At the height of their fame they weren’t too effective at getting on the web (phones not BA and the crew). Firstly, they had screens taken directly from calculators and, secondly, dial-up internet didn’t appear until 1990.

As technology progressed, so the phone shrank in size, The A Team were lost from TV and a form of internet appeared on mobile phones, with really tiny monochrome screens. Sites were written in WML, were hard to program and generally rubbish.

Sorry if this is getting a bit technical.

Scroll forward a few more years children are running around having never heard of The A Team and we’ve all got tiny mobile phones with colour screens, cameras and picture messaging. Many people agreed that we truly lived in blessed times.

This is when the shift occurs. Howling Mad Murdoch is guest-starring in Star Trek and two really big things happen.

First, people start building mobile websites containing information that might actually be useful when you’re mobile.

And second, screens (and subsequently phones) start to get larger, enabling you to see what’s on the aforementioned internet.

And then it’s announced that there’s going to be a new A Team movie. The size of mobile phones doubles overnight. The iPhone is released, people are on Facebook and checking emails.

Google releases the G1, a mobile phone with a QWERTY keyboard, on October 22 2008. Thirteen years to the day after the episode ‘Lease With An Option To Die’ aired. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide.

As the phones began to pulsate and expand in our hands, so too did the use of the mobile internet. In 2008 there were 16 million of us a month. On average a gob-smacking 31 thousand new people joined us.

Sites multiplied with companies providing stripped-down mobile versions of their websites and all manner of other mobile gubbins to slake the data-thirst.

I would suggest two simple reasons for this:

1. Technology is giving people access to sites and applications that are genuinely useful

2. Liam Neeson has allegedly been cast as Hannibal...

It’s expected you’ll need the strength of Mr T to lift the new Nokia.

Adam Maxwell is the founder of web design company Superhighwaymen www.superhighwaymen.com