Lure of mobile phones too much for US geeks

Wired on Friday: It's an oddity - to the point of being a cliche - that Americans don't like and don't understand mobile phones.

An MIT survey, released last month, showed that 30 per cent of US adults list the mobile phone as their most hated invention. Even geek Americans treat them with disdain.

Excited Europeans rush to US-dominated tech discussion websites such as slashdot.org to report the rollout of 3G or a brighter colour display, only to be treated with roundhouse scoffing. US techies relate how much they despise ringtones in public places and how they always keep their work phone turned-off.

Times, however, are changing. More than half of American households have at least one of the cursed items: around the same level that Europe reached in 2000. Public concourses are, at last, full of teenagers calling each other. The tipping point, it appears, has been reached.

But what about the geeks? Yankee nerds, used to laptops, still despise the keyboard and displays of the modern phone. Preferring instant messaging, they're uncomfortable with both the interruptions of a phone call and the limitations of the text message. In a country where bigger is better, the mobile phone has always seemed a cut-down, cheap-rate device compared to the mighty power of the PC.

Even there, though, inroads are being made. And when they are, they may well transform mobile phones for everybody in the world.

The US geek is determined to turn the mobile phone into a mobile general purpose computer.

"It's not just a cameraphone," says Mr Rael Dornfest, showing off his latest phone acquisition. "It's a powerful computer with a built-in sensor."

Mr Dornfest is the editor of Mobilewhack, one of a growing number of websites devoted to messing around with the internals of the modern mobile phone.

The same types who bootstrapped the PC industry in the US are finally falling upon the possibilities of the mobile: not as handy device for talking to people but as a portable PC.

Dornfest's background is writing and documenting scripts and utilities for the PC or Mac - little tricks to eke out the best from the modern desktop box.

Small programs like this, written by amateurs or very small businesses, are the undergrowth to giants like Microsoft and Oracle's towering applications in the PC world. They're also what drives a sizeable chunk of US coders - both small software shops and the vast legion of amateur enthusiasts.

Some of the programs are just silly - screensavers, little Flash games, those joke programs that your friends send you and your IT department insist you never double-clip upon.

But others have created whole industries: virus detectors, e-mail filters, even the Web browser could be said to have started this way. And silly or not, millions pay to download professional versions of those games and screensavers.

These shareware and freeware tricks have always been around. The heart of the industry, however, has always been in the US. That industry received a tremendous boost in the mid 1990s when the internet took off. Interested geeks could download programs across the Net, fiddle tweak and improve them, then easily announce their new versions to the world. The competition was tremendous - but so was the improvement in these mini-applications.

These days, a modern smart phone has reached the point of being as powerful as a desktop PC was in 1995 - and the data connectivity is roughly the same as dial-up from that era, and sometimes better.

Even laptop-loving American geeks are beginning to realise that this is an environment that would be as fun to hack on as the golden age of the beginnings of the Net.

Some examples of such mini-hacks: Software for cameraphones that let them read barcodes and report back the online price for a product you're checking out in the electronics store. If its cheaper online, you can purchase it then and here. Or a remote picture-taker - if you lose your phone, SMS a certain code to it, and it'll take a snapshot, and MMS you back what it sees, whether it's the back of a sofa, or the face of a thief.

These programs sound trivial but it's the ocean of little hacks like these that make the PC a far more flexible beast than if it depended on expensive commercial packages. For every hundred duds, there'll be one that changed how you used your PC - and your phone.

Independent European and Japanese developers have been turning out games and simple utilities customised for smartphones for some time. But it's only now that the US's vast audience of geek enthusiasts are beginning to move into this market.

Their timing is understandable. Recently phone manufacturers and telco operators have been much more amenable to letting anyone write programs for their phones. Programs written in standard PC programming languages such as Java can run on modern mobile phones (albeit in a much cut-down environment). More expensive organiser-like phones running established PC-friendly operating systems such as Windows CE and PalmOS make the mobile phone world far less terrifying.

But here comes the deluge: the phone giant Nokia recently announced it will be converting the computer scripting languages Python and perhaps Perl to its Symbian smartphones.

Python and Perl are computer languages that were made for these small, idiosyncratic programs. Designed for coders on the go, they are far more amenable to quick experiments. Python and Perl also work as a lingua franca between machines. While it's as hard now to write a program that runs on any mobile phone, a program written in Python and Perl has a good chance of working anywhere that those languages are supported.

And while only a few thousand programmers have got to grips with the mobile world's homegrown ways of coding, hundreds of thousands know Python and Perl.

Many of them are American. Even if they sneer at phones ruining the atmosphere at the cinema, the idea of a new computer platform to explore is too tempting to resist.

And frankly, with outsourcing exporting US computer jobs to foreign climes, and the economic recovery remaining sternly jobless domestically, these US coders have quite the incentive. And plenty of time on their hands.