Post from the past

I have a confession to make: I don't own - or yearn for - a BlackBerry or a MacBook Air; I don't run my life via a page on Facebook; and officially old-skool, I have a pencil case sitting on my desk because it's a handy place to store paperclips. Of course that also means that I occasionally turn the pages of documents rather than scrolling down. In fact, it's safe to say that technology is more like a second cousin twice removed than my closest friend.

So far so dark ages and if the future of technology is Blindsight, an audio display for mobile phones, then it would appear that my bytes are well and truly toasted.

Having watched and probably chuckled at stressed executives' attempts to schedule a meeting or save a phone number on their mobile phones during a conversation, engineers at Microsoft's research lab in Redmond, Washington, have put a keypad on the back of a mobile phone handset to allow users to press keys while they talk. Then all you need is be fluent in ticks and beeps to understand what time slots are free in your calendar, New Scientist (March 1) reports. For example after you press 3 and hear the word calendar, "a busy morning followed by a quiet afternoon (tick, tick, tick, beep, beep) is easy to distinguish from a fully booked day (tick, tick, tick, tick, tick)".

Easy? I don't think I'll throw away my old-fashioned paper diary and lead pencil yet.

As one Microsoft engineer observes, it does sound very fiddly but once upon a time few people would have thought predictive texting would catch on. Good point. Tell that to one London council that has started padding lampposts because, although we might have mastered predictive texting, humans apparently weren't designed to text and walk. Of course that might just be a rumour spread by Luddites like me.