NOKIA E71

As you would expect, we love our mobile phones. Our Malaysia Senior Network Engineer has spent about RM10,000 on phones eversince late last year.

All eyes (except mine, I like my Nokia E61i, and it's not even a year old so it's working perfectly fine) are on the Nokia E71, and has already found a few suitors. The last was our Group Executive Director. He called one of the sales team to help set up UNOS PRO on his swanky new toy yesterday.

Could you have anticipated how important mobile phones are. 15 years ago they were car phones, and if you wanted to make it mobile you had to yank the whole set (which was the size of a CPU) out. Not many people had it then, and those who didn't use it much. Now year 1 students already carrying it around (parents use it as a predecessor to those chip implants; kids use it for well, everything the credit limit can allow them to). The posh have them - Vertu and Prada - and even the not-so-posh ones.

Mobile phones are everything now. It's necessary (in many commnunities the penetration rate is above 100%). It's fashion. It's cheap and mighty expensive. It's for young and old (grandfathers don't know Google and they know Motorola). Computers existed before mobile phones, and yet has not swept the world with the same force.

Watches used to be represent the same as mobile phones. And yet now it's phasing away - the younger generation use mobile phones to tell the time.

I wonder how much more important a mobile phone can become.