Week Thirty-seven – it’s the circle of life!

What goes round comes round and everything eventually will come back in fashion!

From the Old Motorola to the new i-Phone 6 Plus... and everything else in between! 

This week I was overly exited at the arrival of Apple’s conference, which took place, as every year, to announce some new exiting products. If you are an Apple fan you have worked out their cycle of announcements and products and it is around about this time when they come up with something new. It is over two year that they brought us the i-phone5 with the subsequent upgrades of S and C and we have all been waiting the arrival of the new i-phone 6 and this time it comes with it’s twin big brother the i-phone 6+, a larger version and strikingly similar to the Samsung Galaxy. As with Samsung, they have also brought the i-watch to go along with the phone.

But this week’s blog is not a review of the new Apple products or about how exited I was to watch it all being unveiled live on the Internet (though that would make a good blog, “how sad am I to spend two hours watching grown men talk about a phone and a watch?”) No, this week’s blog is all about the circle of life, what goes round comes round… let me explain what I mean.

After getting over the excitement of seeing the new phones I began to think which would I get, the 6 or 6+. As they are currently not physically available, you can only imagine what they are like and what they feel like in real life. Currently I carry one to many mobile devices with me; I have my work laptop, my personal laptop, my i-pad, my work phone, my personal phone… yes I am not kidding you! And in the back of my mind I am always thinking I need to ditch some of them! I went to the website and compared the phones to see what are the major differences. In terms of performance, of course, the higher the phone the better, and the 6+ has better potential. One thing I have learnt in technology is that it pays off to get the highest specification, it will last you longer and it wont get antiquated too soon or stop performing because of the ever fast changing technology world. This made me think I should get the 6+ and be done with anything in between. When you put them together you can more or less figure out the differences in size between them but without actually seeing it, I am still struggling with what it would be like to have the 6+. Eventually I took my i-pad mini and compared it with the i-phone 6+ to try and get a notion of its size. Whilst doing this I had an idea; If I am to reduce the number of devices I carry, getting the 6+ could replace the i-pad mini, as they are closer in size (the i-phone 6+ has a 5.5 inch screen which I think is decent enough to work on). I use the i-pad for when I travel to read e-mails and general browsing without having to open either of my laptops (the phone is no good for longer periods, you get a finger ache, your eyes get tired and I can’t type for too long as my fingers are too fat and the words come out wrong!) so that was it! Dilemma solved! I will reduce the number of gadgets and buy the i-phone 6+!

My passion for technology has existed for years and I remember buying my first mobile phone almost 20 years ago! Now if you can cast your minds back to the mid 1990’s, mobile phones in those days looked similar to the bricks we use for build houses! Motorola was the leader in the market and the phone I had was the one that had the antenna you had to pull out before making a call, the flap you had to open to dial the numbers and it’s enormous battery was actually three quarters of the actual phone, was sexy and it was cool if you had one! You always carried it on a leather pouch, which you hanged on the side of your belt, as the dam thing was too big to put in your pocket. It was a great phone but it was also too big!

And towards the late 90s the era of making everything small began! It wasn’t just phones that were big back then, it was everything; your desktop computer occupied half of your desk and the monitor needed a foot long of space behind them to fit its enormous body, laptops were just coming out and they weren’t laptops, they were smaller desktops that flipped open and weigh a ton to carry around! Televisions were so big; you needed three people to carry a 32-inch monitor and a van to deliver it! Everything was big and we needed to make it small. And slowly but surely we went into reducing things, computers became smaller, flat screens and monitors were invented, laptops became tiny and light and mobile phone became so minute it was almost impossible to talk and listen at the same time! The world of technology became small and even your sim card shrank to a small piece of plastic call Nano sim card. The world had conquered smallness!

All exited about saving for my i-phone 6+, the next day I went to work, carrying my work laptop, my i-pad and my work phone. At the back of my mind there was the picture of my i-phone 6+. Everyone was talking about the new Apple products, and everyone knows I love Apple so they were asking me about what I was going to get. By the way, there are people who do not care about technology and still don’t have a smart phone and in a conversation with a group of people, someone’s phone rang and they answered it. I looked at it and for a moment I was transported back in time and saw one of my old phones, a tiny minute Nokia phone which can hardly reach your ear and mouth at the same time, this was an old handset, the ones that got really small! And suddenly it hit me like boulder rolling down a hill! It’s the circle of life! Even technology cannot avoid it!

My passion for mobile devices began 20 years ago with a humongous handset by Motorola and over those 20 years I was always looking for the next smaller model to have. Here I am, 20 years later and I am looking for the biggest model I can have! I’ve gone back a full circle, I am going to have a mobile phone that is as big, if not bigger, than the one I bought all those years ago! We are evolving, yes, and technology gets better and faster, but we are also going back a full circle and everything is getting big again! Mobile phones, Samsung began this with it’s Galaxy S, computers; screens are getting bigger again, flat, but bigger, Televisions; you need an enormous living room to fit in the new 70 inch televisions in the market! Even airplanes, from concord to the new A380 Airbus! It’s the circle of life - you can’t avoid it!

Apple is marketing it’s new phone “bigger than bigger” I wonder how much bigger things will get before we go back to being small?