As the dust settles from the iPhone whirlwind, sanity returns. Whilst it is truly a brilliant gadget and will upset a few vendors out there, let’s not allow Jobs to get away with his claim to re-invent the phone. There was an apparent contradiction in his presentation, which on the one hand wanted to impress us with its “three gadgets in one” smorgasboard of features and slick user interface widgets and on the other hand wanted to condescend with its “calling is the killer app” awakening.

If calling is the killer app, then our hats must go off to those who have made it so widespread, which is the Nokias and Motorolas of this world. That said, the unsung heros of the mobile revolution are those who make the chips around which the phone and UI is mere window-dressing. Granted, the UI is an important part of the device and the likes of Motorola have got it so terribly wrong in the past. However, I’ve yet to meet even the most technically-challenged of users who couldn’t make a call, so I hardly think that Apple has re-invented that bit. As for visual voicemail, it’s only a nice to have. In many countries - perhaps those with less verbose habits - users simply don’t bother with it. Texting replaced voicemail many years ago.
Most users will be unaware of exactly how amazingly challenging it is to get a mobile phone to make a call. The wireless bit happens to be very complex. Most of the time we can’t see the base station sitting on a rooftop, in some field or in some ugly piece of industrial scrap land. The signal to and from our mobile has to bounce off (reflection) and meander through (defraction) all kinds of obstacles to get to where it’s going. At the other end, that mixed up bounced signal is like a pile of spaghetti. Removing the signal from the mess is a bit like trying to get oil out of water. In fact, it’s more complex than that. Imagine not only trying to get oil out of water, but separating olive oil from sunflower oil in the process, which is the additional task of separating one signal out from another.

As if all this signal cleaning and separation isn’t enough, an additional challenge is squeezing the human voice into the tiny virtual pipe that is left after all the cleaning up. The signal coming out of the microphone in the mouthpiece is simply too fat. The solution is called compression and, a bit like quantum mechanics, no amount of explaining how it works can do it justice, nor really reveal its secrets. What happens is that the mobile records the voice, works out a kind of model for the vocal chords, lips and tongue of the talker and then transmits the model to the other end. Thereafter, instead of sending the sounds of the talker, the mobile tells the model at the other end how to reproduce the sounds it’s hearing at the microphone.

Why am I labouring about the complexity of what’s inside the mobile? Well, when GSM phones were first launched, the computing power inside them exceeded that of the desktop PC, which back then was probably powered by a Pentium P60 (the one with the math bug). All that computing power - and more - still resides within the phone and yet today it is possible to retail a complete mobile phone for 50 dollars or less, which is the promise of the remarkable Motofone from Motorola (once called Africaphone). The goal is nothing less than to “connect the next billion” users.

If calling is the killer app, then giving that capability to another billion people on this planet really is revolutionary. In fact, the transformative potential of the mobile phone is heightened in areas where communications are otherwise poor. My hat goes off to the inventors of the Motofone and all those who make the silicon magic happen inside any mobile phone. That said, I’ll still be lining up for an iPhone when they hit Europe and be more interested in how it looks and feels than what it does on the inside.