Worth it? Ohhh, yeah. But while we wait I read an article yesterday regarding the wireless market sector. It was in the Saturday edition of the Boston Globe, page 15 and was entitled "In Finland, cellular phones aare the talk of the century". I was reading it, and transcribing it while lazin' around in a favorite downtown pub(I tell ya, city's are GREAT places to be during the holidays. All the crowds go to the beach, mountains, etc., ostensibly to "get away from it all", and they end up doing THAT, in a crowd. Heh!). The transcribed article follows.....
At the sun-splashed outdoor cafe besides Hakaniemi harbor, I sat down at a table and the smiling waitress came over. She had a small bblack pad but no pen or pencil. I placed a fairly complicated order, soup, entree, vegetable, salad dressing, and a mug of Finland's famous beer, Lapin Kulta("The Gold of Laplan"). But the waitress didn't write anything down. Instead, she unfolded that black pad - it turned out to be a cellular phone - and called the kitchen, perhaps 15 yards away, to relay my order. Then she took her phone and her smile and moved on to the next table.
That is evidently a perfectly normal way for a waitress to operate here in the world's most wireless nation, a country that seems to have developed a national consensus that anything worth doing is worth doing by mobile phone. Americans often think of themselves as the most technologically advance people on earth. But when it comes to incorporating the latest telecommunications technology into daily life, Finland is far ahead of us. The country has 5 million people and 3 million cell phones - a penetration rate of 60 percent, more than TWICE the US level. Finland is the first country to have more mobile phones than traditional fixed-line units. But it won't be the last. In telecom circles, it is accepted wisdom that every advanced nation will fairly quickly reach Finnish levels of cell phone saturation. Finland, then gives us a chance to see our telephonic future.
Virtually every man, woman and teenager here, from investment bankers in dowtown Helsinki to reindeer herders on the Arctic tundra, carries a mobile telephone. The most common Finnish word for cellular phone is "kannykka" which roughly translates into "little hand," so that linguistically, at least, such a phone is now considered a part of the body. Walk down the street in Helsinki and you will see phone-carrying window washers, bus drivers, trash collectors, bicyclists, and in-line skaters chatting away as they work or play. Mobile phone usage is universal in high school, students say, and some unhappy rincipals are moving to install metal detectors.
"It's not for guns like in your American schools," laughed Hanna Riihelainen, a senior at Helsinki's Laajasalon High. "They're trying to keep us from using our phones in class. But it doesn't work. We hold the phones in our laps and send text messages back and forth."
Like its Scandinavian neighbors, Finland is a fiercely egalitarian nation, and it is important here that rich, and poor alike have access to technological advances. Mobile phone rates are low, generally between $10 and $40 per month. To help less fortunate people Finnish telephone companies offer family plans with lower rates for households with multiple phone numbers. On the other hand, Finnish telephone companies are phasing out phone booths, on the grounds that hardly anybody uses them anymore.
The telephone book, too, is going the way of the dinosaur. When people call for directory information, the operator sends the number in the form of a text message; a touch of a key on the cell phone will save it in memory. As a result, each Finn can carry around a personal phone book inside his or her phone.
The dark side of telephones has also gone mobile. Telemarketers routinely call cell phones, so that you can be walking down the street and suddenly have a stranger ring up to offer a time share in Lapland. Even worse, people are starting to get "junk text messages" - unsolicited ads and notices that shou up on the phones display screen.
Etc., etc., etc.. As a telecom professional I personally find this article extremely intriguing for all that it portends. Not just as it relates to cellphones, but in a larger fashion to this whole wireless concept of a Personal Services Device capable of anything from allowing you to make a call, to downloading internet information(such as on-line newspapers, etc.). The bottom line? The demand for batteries is only gonna go up, with applications in the future that we cannot even imagine yet.
John~ |
