In the dark and distant days of the beginning of digital mobile telephony, I remember Orange had introduced a new phone that included the ability to send and receive SMS (text) messages. It also had a number of tunes you could pick instead of the standard ring tones, including the now famous Nokia Tune.
As part of a press junket, I remember being on a train heading to an open day for journos down in Bristol (the then base for Orange), where we would get to see all there was to see at Orange.
I ended up sitting in a group of very old men who wrote about technology in some of the leading papers at the time. Some might argue that in order to encourage Orange to be portrayed in a good light, they had given almost everybody on the train one of the new phones for free, with a huge amount of free bundled minutes. Most of the journos had had their phones for a week or two before being gathered on the train to Bristol.
I watched as three very famous and respected gentlemen journos opposite me did that old person thing of discussing the new phone, but with a snarl in their voices. The most outrageous thing in their mind was the fact that you could pick this ‘ghastly’ tune to play instead of standard ringing tones. “Why on earth would anybody want something like that. How ridiculous!” was one response.
A decade later of course, we have a thriving industry that just provides mobile phone ring tones, or kids cutting up their favourite mp3s to suit. At the time I remember thinking it seemed like a fun idea, and why not, yet these chaps were adamant people would only ever want “ring ring”.
The subject of this new fangled text messaging idea also came up. Again these guys convinced themselves that we would never need to return to text, which had been the basis of pager based communication before mobile phones, as, in their words, it was primitive and no longer relevant. My feeling at the time was that it had legs, and in a business environment sending data such as an address as well as talking to the person by voice made sense. I also mused that it could be used to say ‘I love you’. This didn’t go down well, and I could see on their faces that I was definitely an outsider with that sort of thinking.
Here we are and its only a decade later of course, and text is now used to flirt, arrange encounters, fight, or even dump partners. It’s gone far beyond a simple ‘I love you’.
As we now watch the mobile phone become a multi-tasking device, capable of taking and editing videos, playing live TV, listening to radio from around the world, reading and writing e-mail, playing and editing mp3s and so on and so on, whilst from time to time being used for voice communication, there’s one thing that’s not yet been enabled in the UK. But, I think it’s going to be the next big big craze.
It’s called Push-to-Talk (or PTT). Texting as a craze in most of America is non-existent, compared to other continents such as Australia. The reason texting never caught on was because they had something better first, which is PTT.
To explain what PTT is, you have to think of an old fashioned walkie talkie. You press a button on your mobile, talk for a number of seconds, and through the speaker of your destination mobile phone, you voice blurts out whatever you just said. Now, to make it more efficient there’s a little delay between saying something and it coming out of the other mobile. It’s only a short delay, but during that time, everything you said whilst pushing the button was crunched up into a compressed data file, queued, sent as a ‘packet’ and then uncrunched at the other end. The person at the other end can reply using the same method. Obviously, each of you speak one at a time (like text or CB), it’s not ideal for a more complex conversation. Because this is using the mobile phone’s cell network then obviously, each handset can be anywhere. In theory, even in other countries.
The pricing structure appears to be based on a daily or monthly flat rate in places where the PTT craze rules. In other words you pay a fixed price and can PTT to as many other phones as you want to as often as you want to. The system allows ‘group call’ so you can say something once and it be heard by a number of phones at the same time.
Anyway, my point is that this is just being enabled by the network operators in the UK, but not being released for general use. Why oh why?
When the networks do finally unlock PTT and allow us to use it in the UK, it’ll be a monster. I predict that people will discover PTT, and assuming it is priced right, I can see it capturing the imagination of kids, of business people, of families, of, well, everybody really. It’s functional and fun. Like text, but faster and easier.
I’m guessing the networks will panic a bit about the lost revenue for the dropping down of text usage that will no doubt accompany the PTT craze, but I’m sure they’ll make sure they don’t go bust. I just hope they don’t keep the price of PTT artificially high in the process.
England's England 