The Auctioneer-the official blog of Auction.ph

It is a trip trying to imagine the future of cellular phones. Touch-screen, designer phones and ultra-expensive, overachieving phones are being introduced one after the other and images of the future of hand-held phones should be the stuff technophile wet dreams are made of. While engineers continue to dazzle us with ingenuity, it should be amusing to poke fun at some of their harebrained mishaps.

1.  Ericsson. The veritable Motorola chunky phone successor. Ages ago, Ericsson released an affordable phone that   looked like a crude gadget from Futurama. The display was almost as small as a pager’s but it introduced a changeable keypad background. The neon accessory could be considered as the forefather of mobile phone personalization. Notwithstanding, even with neon green, orange, or pink, the phone was still one of the ugliest things on the planet. A friend was retelling me a story about it one time and she said that she actually found a way to enjoy the phone. She said she enjoyed playing the game. I asked her how playing a game could be possible with a window display designed for one line only. “Who said the game needed a window? The phone was perfect for spin the bottle,” said my friend.

2. Alcatel. A couple of years later, Alcatel released a peanut-shaped cellular phone that could run on AAs. At that time, my brother was changing his cell phone as much as he changed girlfriends, which is to say, happened almost quarterly. The Alcatel phone was reasonably priced and he thought that a phone running on AAs was going to be the next big thing. During that time, the Ericsson phone with interchangeable faces was already rave-worthy, so my brother had good reason to think that Alcatel’s ‘innovation’ could become the next hype. He bought the phone and he went home ecstatic. He was even more thrilled because unlike most battery-operated toys, the phone came with batteries included. We gathered around the new phone and he demonstrated the value of a phone running on AAs. He said imagine getting stranded on a mountain top, with his new phone, he would not have to worry about running low on charge because he can always pop in batteries.

It was a difficult point to argue with. Running on DC does carry intrinsic emergency-readiness value but aesthetically, it just looked wrong. I’d hate to see myself in a public setting shoving double As in a cellular phone. If it were a CB radio, I’d feel comfortable. It might even look cool. But on a cell phone…never.

Two days later, my brother ultimately decided to sell the peanut-shaped phone at ten percent off and he threw in extra batteries for good measure.

I guess if it comes down to a choice between a phone that could help you score pogi points or a phone that could save you from dying alone on a mountain, choose the former. Just stay away from mountains.

3. Nokia (The 33-something with the dancing lights). There should be a new term for eavesdropping. In cramped public transports, where people send and receive text messages all the time, it seems quite impossible to avoid glancing and reading the messages of other people seated around us. I can’t think of a catchy term but SMSeavesdropping should do for now. I guess the engineers at Nokia had this strange hobby in mind when they designed the phone that broadcasts your text messages. Why would anyone want to do that? Maybe they thought a party would look so much cooler with “wer u na?” messages flashing in mid-air.

4. Mobile phone with a breathalyzer. In Japan, manufacturers developed a mobile phone that can tell you if you are drunk. They should have taken this one step further and integrated the Nokia dancing lights. So instead of “wer u na?”, the ambient messages would say “im hammered and im about to hurl.” Now that’s what I call a party phone.

Recently, a friend told me that a new hi-tech handheld is coming out that is so advanced you don’t even have to key in your text messages, it just picks it up right out of your brain. I don’t know about you, but if that story is true, that should be one of the ridiculously funniest phones I have ever heard of.

But if you are serious about phones, check out the mobile phone specialization page on www.auction.ph.