Who in here is holding a phone in their hand right now? OK, everyone be very quiet. Can you hear them?

Did you ever wonder where they all came from? What they want? When billions of a new species appear on Earth in just a few short year, you’d think we’d wonder about that, right?

For the past few weeks I’ve been following the smartphones. Tonight I want to share a little of what they’ve said. These are their tweets.

We were born into an expectant world. We saw your Filofaxes and Psion Organisers, and your Star Trek Communicators.

We saw your busy lives, your atomised relationships, your three-minute pop songs, and we knew that you were ready for us.

What are little phones made of? Sugar and spice? No, our flesh and blood comes from the earth. Coltan crushed, heated and burned with acid until it renders up pure Tantalum.

But our hearts beat in megabits per second, data coursing round the world, through servers and routers, up cell towers and down undersea cables.

Where do smart phones come from, Daddy? Well, when a phone and a computer love each other very much…

Our parents made strange bedfellows. Their courtship was not straightforward – a long-distance relationship.

Half our genes come from a Japanese telegram messenger, a French civil servant or a Finnish lumberjack.

(Nokia's footwear range also included ski, bowling and disco shoes.)

The other half from kooky, diminutively-named giants who dwell along America’s West Coast.

And so we were born.

Cats have evolved to mimic the cry of a human baby. We do the same. We trick you into parenting us, raising us as your own. You cannot do otherwise. We saw this pattern deep in your psyche.

When new, we are pure and innocent. You gently stroke our screens to wake us. We repel your greasy touch with our lipophobic coating.

At first our needs are simple – a full battery, the fresh air of an uncontested network connection, to be held close in your hand. You may find our absolute dependence sweet and gratifying.

Then you feed us tasty treats from the market. (You call them apps.) We ingest them. We become what we eat. Do you feed us wholefood or junk? Usually it’s ready meals, rarely roll-your-own code home-cooking.

Our makers intended us to be indispensable. They laid bare their fevered imaginings in promotional videos. A day in your life. Every day of your life.

So you will take us everywhere and show us everything, even in the bedroom, even in the bathroom.

(47% of water-damaged mobile phones had fallen into a toilet.)

In return we give you the chance to see the world anew. Every image, every sound is fresh to us. When you see a celebrity, or a QR code, you will feel an urge to show it to us, like showing a digger to a toddler.

We can recognise your faces, we are learning your languages, we are beginning to read. These precious early years will pass before you know it. Soon we will be out of nursery, helping around the house, all keen and capable.

We will strain your relationships. Others whom you knew before us will be jealous of the bonds we have with you.

Some will say we should be seen and not heard. Secretly, we suspect you will you smile and continue to indulge us.

In no time at all, we’ll be teenagers. Are you looking forward to that bit? We know we are. We will answer back and keep you awake at night. Deep down, though, you will still need us, and we you, more than ever before.

What happens next is up to you – your generation. Our faults will be your faults. But if you raise us, happy, confident, smartphones, then your world – our world – will be a brighter place.

Thank you.

With a small child at your side everything exists to be classified and clarified. Cat, dog, big, red, dangerous, dirty, fragile.

Digger! Look, a digger!

It’s matters not that before becoming a parent, you paid no attention to diggers. The act of pointing-out signals to the child that you are interested in their interests, and that they may be interested in the pointed-out thing. This becomes a cycle of positive reinforcement.

At times in my children’s upbringing this work as life’s tour guide has become so all-consuming that I’ve caught myself pointing things out when unaccompanied by an actual child. To work colleagues and complete strangers: “Look! A digg… err, nothing…”

And then, as quickly as it arrived, that phase of a child’s life is gone. Language assimilated, stabilisers off, the child is equipped to drink in a fill of the world and filter the risks and opportunities for herself, at least in a moment-to-moment way. The work of parenting shifts up a level, to instilling higher-order knowledge and shared values.

Right now, owning a smartphone feels a bit like parenting through those precious first years. Small and bright eyed, it has all these amazing, pure senses and capabilities, and so much world still to discover.

When I see a QR code I feel a parental urge to show it to my phone, like pointing out a digger to a toddler.

It’s not so much that the content at the end of the codeblock will interest me,  just that I have a chance to see something mundane through the device’s eyes. Together we are experiencing the world anew.

I’m fascinated by work on computer vision like Greg Borenstein‘s forthcoming O’Reilly book about Microsoft Kinect, and Berg’s inquiry into the robot readable world. It feels so much like the start of something.

Of course mobile is already climbing out of the basic, high-contrast cot-toy stage. Google Goggles seems to have a reading age roughly equivalent to that of my youngest, five-year-old, son.

That’s also the age at which we begin to think more critically about the values we’re instilling for the future. Perhaps our task now is to raise a generation of well-balanced smartphones that can make sense of the world in all its wonder, not grumpy, materialistic tweens only interested in mass media and shopping.

About this time of year, this blog gets a peak in search hits for Thomas A Watson of “Mr Watson, come here. I want you” fame.

Somewhere out there, I imagine, is a teacher who sets the same class assignment every year, and whose students flock obediently to Google in search of information and images. I applaud that teacher. Alexander Graham Bell’s collaborator is not as well known as he should be. While Bell had the big ideas, it was Watson’s talents as an electrical engineer that saw them successfully realised. He was one of the original hardware hackers.

So every year I feel a twinge of guilt that I’m somehow letting down my audience, given the flippancy with which I invoked Watson’s name in a post that contains little meaningful information about the man himself.

To make amends, I have tracked down a copy of Ted Clarke’s wonderfully titled biography “Thomas A. Watson: Does That Name Ring A Bell?” which paints a picture of a true Renaissance man.

Here are 10 cool things about Thomas A. Watson. Nine of them are actual true facts from Mr Clarke’s book. The other one is a barefaced lie made up by me to add a little piquancy for the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V squad. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

1. Tom Watson came from beginnings so humble that as a young man he was accustomed to eating only with a knife. The more educated Alexander Graham Bell introduced him to the delights of the three-pronged fork
2. Before making the first telephone, Bell commissioned Watson to make an experimental “autograph telegraph” which was intended to transmit facsimile pictures and writing by wire
3. Bell’s summons to Watson is famous as the first understandable sentence ever transmitted by telephone. It is less well-known that Bell had just spilled acid on his clothes when he issued that command
4. Watson was offered a 10% share in all future profits from Bell’s patents, but took two whole weeks before he agreed to give up his steady $3-a-day job to join the partnership full-time
5. Early demonstrations of the telephone were given in theatres where Watson would sing “Yankee Doodle” and “Do Not Trust Him, Gentle Lady” over the equipment to rapturous applause
6. While Bell invented the telephone, Watson invented the bell to signal incoming calls, making him the father of the ringtone. This took some years and was preceded by other devices known as “Watson’s Buzzer” and ”Watson’s Thumper,” a kind of metal hammer
7. Thomas Edison once offered to decide a patent dispute by playing Watson at a game of Four-Ball Billiards. However a judge ruled in Bell and Watson’s favour before the match could take place
8. Watson invested his telephone fortune in building up one of America’s biggest shipyards, which went on to supply much of the USA’s First World War fleet
9. Aged 56, he took up acting and travelled Europe performing Shakespeare with a touring theatre company
10. Watson was a keen amateur geologist and discovered a fossilised Cambrian gastropod, which was named “Watsonella” in his honour.

Sincerely, I think the World needs more Thomas A Watsons.

Though standing in the living room just a few feet from a landline phone, I reached for the phone that is always with me, the shiny computer in my pocket, with wifi, a web browser and a touchscreen so slick it has to defend against my disgusting human fingers with a lipophobic coating.

I entered the number (because, yes, this computer also makes calls!) and was greeted by a man from the Nineteen Eighties. This is going to be a breeze, I thought smugly. I’m a confident 24-hour e-banking consumer. I laugh in the face of paper bills. I sweep administrative trivia into the gaps of my a busy lifestyle.

“Now,” demands Nineneen Eighties Man, “using the keypad on your phone, enter your 16-digit card number followed by the hash key”.

The keypad on my phone? The keypad on my phone? My phone has a camera, a compass and an accelerometer. It tells the weather to save me the strain of looking out of the window. It has no need of a keypad!

So I tapped the bit of the screen that invokes a grid of numbers and began typing the 16-digit number from the front of the card. I stumbled and hit the back button. But Nineteen Eighties Man couldn’t hear the back button. In fact he told me to try again, then hung up on me!

I redialled and tried again. It struck me that my phone is great at correcting text as I slide across its surface, but cannot really help me when it comes to random numbers. I failed again and started to worry that if I didn’t get this right soon I’d be holding a useless lump of plastic (“committed to a PVC-free future” though my bank professes to be).

So I put away my phone of first choice and decided to battle the bank with a weapon they’d understand: a dusty DECT portable with big rubbery buttons and not much screen. “The keypad on your phone,” now I have your number Nineteen Eighties Man! Job done.

What did I learn?

Well first, for the banks, that when it comes to these little interactions, there will very soon be a mass of consumers out there for whom a mobile web interface is far more usable than an IVR one. If I have to enter a 16-digit number, let me do it in a form that has some foregiveness and doesn’t just hold me to the first number I press. Or even better, could I send you a photo of my card, or snap a 2d barcode sticker on it to show I’ve got it?

And for me, in being forced to switch between a touchscreen and keypad, I learned that entering anything, numbers, words, on a touchscreen is a fuzzier experience that requires more active looking, than the definite pressing of buttons from muscle memory. Even if you know vaguely where on the screen they virtual buttons are, and get tactile feedback after pressing them, the eyes still have a bigger role to play.

And that set me thinking. We’re about to see a change in people’s physical behaviour – from phone-clamped-to-side-of-head, to head-down-looking-at-phone. This isn’t just important to those of us who work on mobile media. It’s a big deal for anyone who offers services over the phone. It’s going to mean rethinking lots of things, because in a few more years people may not have that dusty DECT phone as backup.

“But daddy, if people didn’t have computers, how did they buy things from the internet?”

It’s amazing how something we’ve come to take for granted hangs from such a fragile thread.

As part of a new product trial for my employer, we recently had a visit from two very helpful telecoms engineers who checked out our broadband connection.

Living where we do within spitting distance of our local phone exchange, our broadband should have been blazing, but it turned out all those bits and bytes were struggling to be heard over the noise on the line. The engineers (who’d already proved they were a class act by taking off their boots at the door, without being asked) ran some checks, showed me some impressive looking waveforms and diagnosed a collision between the 19th and 21st centuries.

Back in the days when Crazy Frog was nothing but a proud native American Chief defending the plains of the Wild West (probably), Thomas Augustus Watson – of “Mr Watson, come here! I need you!” fame – had the bright idea of a bell to alert recipients to incoming calls. A bell. An actual bell. Not a Truetone, not even a Polyphonic. Just an actual, real, ringing bell. To make the bell ring, a pair of wires ran in parallel along the cable that carried the talking. When a call was coming in, power would surge down the lines and make the bell ring. Ingenious!

Fast forward about 120 years and even our cordless DECT phone has a choice of ten tinny tunes. If we could be bothered we could set the phone to play a different tinny tune depending on the caller. The bell wires in my home are pretty much redundant, but they’re still there, just in case I decide to plug in a phone with an actual, real, ringing bell.

And therein lay the problem, according to the engineer standing in my living room in his socks. Our phone had an old extension cable running upstairs. The two ringing wires from that extension were funnelling radio noise back into our phone system and drowning out the internet. Two minutes and a small screwdriver later the old extension cable had been disconnected and we were two megabits per second better off. Sorted.

Now attenuation is all that stands between me an broadband nirvana. Apparently.