A world gone mad where size really is everything

Date Published: 01-Aug-2012

Technology geeks have gone into overdrive with the news that the new Apple iPhone could be as much as half a millimetre slimmer than its predecessor – proving yet again that size truly is everything, particularly when it comes to mobile phones.

For most of us, news of this incredible shrinking iPhone will be offset by the fact that – should we be lucky enough to ever own one – we’ll have to keep it in a plastic or leather case to ensure it doesn’t get scratched from the car keys in our pocket.

And with the best will in the world, the average phone cover is several millimetres thick – which means your new anorexic iPhone has in fact actually put on weight to protect it.

So half the world goes mad to get this new supermodel version of the mobile – and then puts a big leather coat on it to ensure that nobody ever actually sees it in all of its glory.

Saner people might suggest this rather defeats the purpose of the slimming exercise in the first place, but this seems to be more about owning or desiring one of the tiny phones – you might ever call them micro-phones – rather than actually using it.

Of course all of this is even more laughable if you remember back to the world we lived in when mobile first came onto the market – size was everything then too, but it was about how big they could be as opposed to how tiny.

There would have been no point owning a new fangled phone if no one could see it – so you needed one the size of a small brick, complete with a large aerial, into which you could shout instructions to no one in particular just to impress everyone in the pub.

The battery alone required its own suitcase and the mobile would scarcely fit into a hold-all, let alone your pocket….whereas now we’re one step away from a phone that is simply an implant into your ear so that nobody even knows you have one.

Of course the danger here is that, when you’re on this new micro-phone, people will think you’re simply talking to yourself and you will be carted off to the funny farm.

We’ve had this phenomenon in the past of course – with televisions, which were once reasonably sized objects which quietly sat in the corner before they went all widescreen and needed a rear on them to rival an American in a sweetshop.

Then they found a way to get rid of the tube at the back and turn them into flat screens which could, for example, be hung on the chimney breast where the cheap print of the Connemara landscape used to be.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.