Do you remember when cell phones first came into the market in the late 90s ?EXIT land lines and having to wait hours to receive a phone call-ENTER Mobile phones- your own shiny personal gadget to call whenever you wanted to (and mostly just show off )Back then it didn’t matter that your cell was just as huge as the old telephone booth handsets .It was probably the one time that size really didn’t matter-and the size was HUGE!
What was your first? The Ericson Model? Ericsson A1018s. A Black bulky box with a solid antenna sticking out which gave you Excellent reception but that thing couldn’t fit in your pocket you literally had to strap it to your belt!
Or was your first purchase the Nokia 2110 -Slightly smaller, but by smaller I mean you still couldn’t wrap your fingers all the way round your phone.
And trust me you needed to have a firm grip on your cell phone
1. Because Cell phones were so costly you couldn’t afford to lose one to the phone snatchers who lurked at every street corner( kind of like air- you knew they were always there you just couldn’t spot them but they could spot you!)
2. Phone Tracking hadn’t yet been invented so phone ikienda imeenda Kabisa! and thank heavens now for tracking and such like technology because at the time it seemed like all phone manufacturers had the same Memo;The bulkier, The better. But thank heavens that technology is driven by the people’s needs (not to be so bold as to think the Nairobi phone snatcher necessitated the demise of huge and bulky phones…
But when you finally got rid of your 90s phone , or more likely some street thug took it off you-The Phone Manufacturers were reading from a New Memo: SLIM,SLIMMER ,SLIMMEST.And the commercials gave us comparative graphics showing us the super slim phones against the palm of your hand- Take that phone snatcher!
And so the Ericson morphed into the Sony Ericson, shrank in size, lost the antenna, fit into your pocket ,but did it still give you excellent reception? Well whether or not the reception was good or lousy can be pegged on this logic: When you had that stone-age phone you were sharing your network with only a handful of people. Then every Tom, Dick and Njoroge suddenly flooded your network… enough said
At this point you wouldn’t be caught dead with those awful eh cell phone wrappers you know the clear plastic bags that clung like a second skin to your phone-. By now your phone was your second skin already- so attached! You couldn’t afford to leave it at home because it was your life! FB, Diary, Mail, Organizer. Also on the off chance that you lost your skin- you could track it pap! Look at the Nokia phone size reduction on the pic below
But that was then and this is now when your phone isn’t just your second skin its your second brain.Enter Smart phones it thinks for you! Look away from your…Samsung and it automatically registers that you are distracted.
New Memo -Sizeable yet not bulky. It needs to announce its presence to all and sundry let’s call it show-off –ability. Enter Tablets something that you fill you can type your assignments and company reports , do your spell check , print if you needed to and mail them all as if you were doing it on your PC. Is it a phone? Is it a computer? It’s still a mobile…well a mobile eh device. A Tablet they call it hmm didn’t the Biblical Moses write the Ten Commandments on a TABLET. Feels like history repeats itself we started out big then went small and now back to the bigger and better.
So Size does matter sometimes you will like it huge sometimes you will like it small.