Some kind of phone hex?

Phones... Mobile Phones... The saying "Can't stand the evil ugly petulant over-used crap little bastards!", springs to mind... Maybe it's not a saying for you lot, but for me it's a life statement. They've seemingly become the most important lifestyle accessory for the masses. Vital communication tool or status symbol for those lacking in real things to do?

Over the last few years mobile phones have improved so much, gaining so many features and accessories that's it's becoming harder to classify what their actual function is. The theory that I had when I got mine at first was "form of contact in an emergency". Your car breaks down (*train for me, and yeah, it broke down every damn day); you phone someone to come and collect you/fix it. You're running late for a meeting with someone; phone ahead and give warning you're going to be late. There are many functional reasons for them, if I try to look, however it seems that their only real purpose nowadays is for girls to tell each other what shoes they're wearing that day, what happened in the daily soap operas and to send mostly crap jokes to each other. There's always the bitching conversation that's most commonly found on UK trains where some poor absent person gets repeatedly insulted by their apparent best friends. Nice...

On their plus side, they now have pretty decent-ish cameras built in. They're getting more powerful graphically and can handle some ok-ish 3D game graphics. Which would be lucky for those of you with no partners, adult magazines, videos, TV, or the Internet (how'd you get here?!), as around 90% of the games are themed around breasts or sex! Although maybe not so lucky if you're a woman, unless you happen to be the type of woman that likes women as well! However, lady or not, the graphics are so downright crap on the "adult" games that you may aswell get your porn from a magazine recovered at the local dump, covered in kitchen leftovers and shat on by all the resident seagulls... Back to the good points: They have good-ish sound quality as MP3 players and the batteries seem to be lasting just as long as they ever did, considering all the extra stuff the phones themselves do. It is a bit strange however that for being the ultimate device in communication, that the games themselves seen to have a complete lack of ANY worthwhile online features... Maybe I should be speaking to Sony and Nokia instead of whining to myself on here!

The games though; there's a fundamental and MASSIVE flaw. The controls. Really, we're expected to press those tiny little bunched together clicking things and hope in vain that we're pressing the correct ones... If the manufacturers want them to be considered as games machines, give us D-Pad style controls. Cars that expect to move anywhere all have wheels, shouldn't phones that expect to play games have a worthy input thingy? It's a crushing experience, and one that my better half has considerably more expertise and time with than I, as her previous job was testing those (mostly) boob-laden games for eight... hours... per... day... Oh... my... god!

My own personal grievance with them, and which is the only thing about them that genuinely affects my life, is that people try to phone me! Argh! For fuck sake! Really, don't they realise? It feels like the "pop in"; that visit that a family member or friend does, turning up at your door unannounced and empty handed (not even a bottle of wine!). The mobile phone call is the vocal equivalent.

So excuse my rant, and I should apologise for this not being an article type thing; but there's very little of interest or of humour to do with mobile phones. Well actually, I do remember a guy at an old job I did, who had a set of cards with various phones on them (mostly of the mobile flavour); the Unique Selling Point of these cards were the ladies who were, ahem, "using" the phones... I really doubt they could hear much with the speaker up/in there! Cue all the vibrate jokes...

The humour part: People use Bluetooth to transfer things from Phone to PC, the PC end is called a "Dongle"! Dong le, geddit? Ho ho ho... I'm reminded of the Watchmen (tm) every time I hear/read the term...

Also pretty funny is the opening picture; that's a real product. Honestly, what complete fucking mentalist designed that thinking that the general public would buy it?!?

* - As a footnote, I'd like to state for the record that I didn't actually own the train, as such...