Andrew Vine: It’s survival of the smartest in battle of wills

There’s something rather smug about the way it keeps springing surprises whilst I’m struggling to plough through the 120-page user manual. I say struggling, because it’s couched in tech-speak that has me turning constantly to the internet in search of a layman’s explanation of what it all means, every dictionary in the house being of pre-computer vintage.

Meanwhile, the phone presses on with a life of its own, displaying a talent for poker-faced mockery of my technological ham-fistedness. Yesterday, it announced that a copy of Treasure Island was now available to read on it – unasked for, but thank you anyway – then delivered an electronic equivalent of the black spot by foxing me with the instructions on how to get at it. I’ll be relying on my battered old paperback for the adventures of Long John Silver, Jim Hawkins and the rest for the foreseeable, I think.

It isn’t that I wanted a smartphone particularly, but rather found myself pushed into it by circumstances. The old mobile had developed an intermittent distracting background crackling which led one friend to inquire sardonically why I was frying sausages instead of giving him my full attention, so plainly it was time to go shopping.

An hour later, under the guidance of a kindly shop assistant who did her best to keep a straight face in response to a series of mystified questions, I took the plunge for the all-singing, all-dancing model, which since it was going to cost me less a month than the old sausage-fryer made perfect sense.

There it was, pinging and plopping and buzzing away, zooming down the information superhighway with me panting breathlessly in its wake, telling me what the weather was going to be like for the next few days, and what time it was in Tokyo, Seoul, New York and Rome, though strangely, when I asked it for the time in Cleckheaton – just to check how smart it really is when it comes to geography – it didn’t seem to understand, suggesting the Czech Republic instead.

Still, it’s more a master of me than I am of it, and that’s down to a chequered history with mobile phones stretching back more than 25 years.

The first one I ever encountered was about the size of one of those plastic emergency petrol cans, and about the weight of half a sack of spuds. It was referred to in wide-eyed wonder as “the portable telephone”, but it was only portable over anything except short distances with the aid of a vehicle.

Getting it to the car from the office required two trips, the first to haul the phone itself, the second to carry a length of coiled cable that had to be plugged into the cigarette lighter, and a four-foot long aerial of whippy sprung steel attached to a heavy magnetic base that was to sit on the roof of the car in order to guarantee a signal. Calls had to be kept brief, since the battery only lasted for 20 minutes.

It was with a degree of excitement that I pulled up in a supermarket car park to make a first call on it. These things were such a novelty that a small crowd of curious shoppers gathered as the aerial went onto the roof with a clang, and the cables connected, making the car resemble a scaled-down version of a television outside broadcast unit.

The call was made, and the cables disconnected. The phone was lifted – with effort – into the boot, and I went to take the aerial down. It wouldn’t budge. The magnet held fast and the car rocked from side to side as I tugged at it, the aerial whipping back and forth, catching me behind the ear. A second small crowd gathered, and began tittering.

After a few minutes, one of them stepped forward and volunteered to help. With two of us hauling on the aerial, it began to move almost imperceptibly, and then, suddenly, the magnet came away, bringing with it a patch of paintwork. The crowd moved from giggling into laughter.

Phones shrank, but the pitfalls only grew larger. Texting was the next minefield to negotiate, as the world went thumb-writing crazy, rattling out terse messages full of their own language that I never quite got to grips with.

David Cameron might not have known that the ubiquitous LOL meant “laugh out loud”, but I too thought it meant “lots of love”, and politely thanked people for their expressions of affection.

So I’m handling the smartphone as gingerly as a live hand grenade. It makes me start slightly every time it pings or plops, which means there’s a battle of wills under way over who’s going to get the upper hand. I have a plan, though. If it’s stumped by Cleckheaton, we’ll see what it makes of Mytholmroyd.