Fergus Cassidy

Upwardly mobile

AS Crocodile Dundee once said about New York: "Imagine 17 million people and they all want to live together". Of course only Hollywood could get away with such quaintness. For New York may be many things, but quaint ain't one of them.

Such a large amount of people living in such a small space has always been attractive to Hollywood and Messrs Scorcese and Allen have created a celluloid caricature for millions throughout the world.

New York is not known for its tolerance for messers, time wasters or chain yankers and the celebrated edge of the twice-named metropolis can be sharp and cutting. Any sacred cows finding themselves in the Big Apple will quickly end up on a plate three feet wide beneath a lake of sauce with a side order of fries.

And the latest saintly bovine to feel the wrath of the city that never sleeps is the mobile phone. As if revelling in stereotype, traditional New York bluntness has found another fad that it's willing to dispatch along with the horse that it rode in on.

The city is considering fining people for using mobile phones in theatres and other public places. Including trains, where passengers may have to go to the space between the carriages to make or receive calls.

Now New York being New York, and most of all being American, people who feel they are being coerced into having to take calls standing up, will not take it lying down and a ruckus can only be around the corner. Excuse me sir but you've been fined for using your mobile in the theatre. "You talkin' to me?". Yes. "Get outta here".

We haven't reached that stage yet in Ireland, but there was a hint of it last year when the transport minister proposed to ban mobiles when driving. The legislation is stalled at the moment apparently for technical reasons, but there was enough chatter to ensure that this issue will not go away any time soon.

There has always been a twilight world between technology and how people behave. Television was going to kill the art of conversation and was blamed for introducing sex to Ireland. Central heating would damage the unity of the family as the coal or turf fire was surrendered to the dog or cat. Cinema was going to destroy theatre and the VCR was going to destroy cinema.

But the mobile phone is unique among technology's offspring by virtue of the fact that it's portable. So portable that an awful lot of people carry it with them wherever they go. There are very few items people really need to carry around all the time. Bottom line: keys, money, bank/credit card in wallet/purse. Add the mobile to that list for a 21st century ready-to-go.

The mobile is a very personal device for most. So much so that it is probably now near the top of the list of things that people most fear being lost or stolen.Valuables can be insured and replaced but the loss of a mobile takes much longer to recover from. Mobiles have decreased in cost, but their value to people has increased dramatically.

The penetration rate of what is still a newish technology is even more dramatic and no where more so than Ireland. In just a few years, the mobile has overtaken ordinary telephones for the first time. Per head of population, Ireland has one of the highest take up rates in the world.

In the communication's revolution of the last 20 years, the mobile has come out pretty much top of the heap as the one single device that people have taken to with great enthusiasm and the computing revolution has created a ringtone army.

Personal computing as we've known it, is set for radical change over the next five years or so. Very little has changed with PCs. They're still expensive and not for the faint-hearted. They've become like the VCRs. Every home has one but its used only for its most basic functions.

But of all the things that could be done to put manners on the grey, ugly boxes, there is one direction that is going to change it fundamentally. Going mobile. The success that the standard telephone achieved once it became liberated from the hall stand, will be repeated by the PC. Phone kingpin Nokia has predicted that by 2004 mobile phones will outpace PCs in internet connection.

Well they would say that wouldn't they, but sooner rather than later the prediction will come true. What has been going on under the bonnet in PCs over the last two decades has been incredible and revolutionary, but it's time for the car to leave the garage.

As Dominic Strowbridge, Motorola's European technology marketing manager said recently: "why develop applications for people to use during the little time that they are stuck in front of their PCs? Why not use a device that's with them all the time"?

When IBM's president predicted in the late 1960s that he couldn't see a future for personal computers, he couldn't possibly have understood the consequences of connecting them to the telephone system.

That connectivity brought a gigantic leap in personal computing and also led to the internet's incredible growth. If such momentous change happened while PCs were confined to the desktop and difficult to operate, what the future has in store could be very exciting.

Put serious computer power into hands that have become very adapted to screens, menus and buttons (not forgetting strengthened thumb muscles), and chances are something very big is going to happen.

Add taking people out of their cars and on to mass public transport systems as with cities like Japan or New York, and we'll witness what happens when 'where do you want to go today' meets 'see what you can do'.