So, was thinking about this the other day (because that’s what I do sometimes…); I’ve lived through four paradigmatic design concepts for the ‘chic’ mobile phone of the day… in a little over a decade.

In the early 90s, my Dad’s second ever mobile phone was a Motorola Micro-Tac, a chunky beast that was a predecessor of the clamshell phone. It weight about a metric tonne and had the aesthetic appeal of a wet brick, but hey – it was early days for the technology.

Next (after dozens of bland, conventional, soap-bar shaped phones) was the Matrix phone; chalk one up for Nokia, that was one good bit of product placement. I had that one for a year and absolutely loved the button that flicked the mouthpiece down.

But the two latest trophies belong to Samsung, as far as I’m concerned. I’m going to ignore the Razr, because clever though it was to make it thin, and metallic, its fundementally a clamshell phone, the award for which I think goes to this phone (or a close relative, can’t quite remember the model number). It was one of the first generation of colour screen mobiles (Tom had one until quite recently), and was very cool. Samsung marketed it heavily and think they did well with it.

The next chic-phone, and victim of a range of imitators at the moment is the new slidey form function.

Wonder what’s next – hopefully no more failed concepts like this Nokia. What do I have? None of the above – I prefer function over form these days, and love my SPV c600….

Have noticed lately a few mobile and broadband providers seem to be looking to lock in their customers for longer contracts – 18 months at a time. Much as this makes sense as a customer retention strategy, can’t imagine it will do anything other than nark consumers off… Certainly I’ll avoid it unless they promise me very, very good incentives (and I’m confident of their customer service levels).

On the other hand, it does mark a decline in the great acquistion drive for ‘new’ technologies — after an astonishingly short period of time. To reach saturation point in the market such as you’re already competing for each others customers at this stage – bravo, the knowledge economy is practically here.

Of course, the digital divide hasn’t been crossed as yet – there’s still a large minority of the population who don’t have access to the latest and greatest services; what’s to be done about them? Well, hopefully we’ll see some government investment and some regulatory controls pushing to make Britain an information egalitarian state [sic], even if the Tories do win the next election. That would make an interesting (if particularly geeky) episode of Yes Minister.

There is an interesting piece on Silicon.com that speculates that an information economy will only truly be driven by all pervasive, ultra fast broadband… there’s some truth in that (although I’m not sure if 1 Gbp/s is it!).