Sunday, March 12, 2006
00:03 by FoxTwo
16 years on, almost no self respecting Singaporean will be caught dead being seen with a pager. "Wah you so behind time ah? Get a handphone lah!" would be the usual ridiculing remark. Today, if you look around you, more than half of the people you see will not only have a mobile phone, they have a mobile phone with a camera. Of course, that was the downfall of our local heroine, Tammy from NYP. Notice I didn't link anything to her name - don't want sex-crazed porn kiddies snooping around my blog :)
00:03 by FoxTwo
Singaporeans And Mobile Phones
16 years on, almost no self respecting Singaporean will be caught dead being seen with a pager. "Wah you so behind time ah? Get a handphone lah!" would be the usual ridiculing remark. Today, if you look around you, more than half of the people you see will not only have a mobile phone, they have a mobile phone with a camera. Of course, that was the downfall of our local heroine, Tammy from NYP. Notice I didn't link anything to her name - don't want sex-crazed porn kiddies snooping around my blog :)
I don't have the videos of Tammy! I will not link the videos!
Geesh, after all these weeks, you'd think the furor over Tammy would be over by now. Anyway, back to what I was talking about - Singaporeans and our handphones.
Now, what's a phone? Yeah it's something Alexander Graham Bell invented so we can talk to people that isn't in the same room as us. What do we Singaporeans do with them? We send SMS on them! Oh yeah, ang mo's will call this "text-ing". They will say "I will text you the address" instead of what we'd say "I will SMS you the address". Pick an ang mo tourist off the streets in Sentosa - chances are they'd never even heard of "SMS", unless they're in the IT industry, in which case SMS means a completely different thing.
This evolution is pretty unique in Singapore and Malaysia. Haven't really seen this much activity in Hong Kong or Taiwan though. It might be because we've been spoilt since day 1 when Singtel, M1 and Starhub all offered free SMS. Ang mo's don't have free SMS - they pay like 5 to 15 US cents per message sent. If we use our handphones and call people, we PAY for the call, and they also PAY for the call (unless he has free incoming calls, another pretty unique Singapore feature). Singaporeans are well known to be kiasu and so we always use the free things. I tell you, ang mo's will be mystified why we'd rather thumb-cycle on our phones to talk to someone else when calling them is technically faster.
This also kind of changes our social interactions with one another too - I remember back when I was a teenager, to be able to get the girls phone number (home phone number mind you! Nobody has a handphone back then!), you're halfway there! Now, nobody bothers about getting her home phone number. We want, nay, need her mobile phone number! Why? So we can SMS love messages to her. It's much safer, you can do it when you're in class, in the bus, in the loo, etc etc. Nobody can overhear you!
Of course the danger is when her current boyfriend happens to be playing with her phone and receives your SMS - then YOU ARE DEAD MEAT hahaha! He will know who you are (your name is in the phone's addressbook) and what you said to her (the smoking gun- the text message you sent!). Of course the hypothetical situation I have presented here can be easily reversed for guys. A girl sends you love SMSes, your wife finds out - you're a man with debts soon (the "alimony" syndrome).
Then now we have phones with cameras that are getting better and better all the time. They are up to 2.1 megapixels now. Who needs a digital camera anymore? You can see schoolboys hanging out at Starbucks (what happened to MacDonald Kids??) sneaking to take pictures of "chio bu's" that walk past them. And, the girl won't be the wiser cos the kids can pretend to be SMSing someone.
I remember once, in one of those forums I frequent, someone from the USA was saying something like "Damn, does everyone in Japan have a camera on their phones?". Yes my friend, everyone in Asia does. Why? Because we're using the GSM network. Phone manufacturers make GSM phones FIRST, then they might think about making a special, custom CDMA version for you guys in USA. Don't whine about how Nokia or Sony Ericcson should make that phone available to you because, you can't use it. The whole freaking world is on GSM! So get off your butts and demand your local provider to switch to GSM. It's a pain for us to get a triband phone so we can auto-roam when we go to the USA you know? Do you know you're one of the very few people left in the whole world who haven't gone metric yet? Our pilots have to learn to think and miles, feet, knots instead of kilometres and metres just cos we fly your F5s and F16s.
Now, there are signs that phones are converging with PDAs. Some phones like the XDA or Treo650, are both a PDA and a phone. If the XDA ever get hung, I can imagine this situation:
Person 1: "oie oie wait ah my phone hang leow... I need to reboot the phone!"
Person 2: "wah lau eh faster lah!"
(XDA runs on PocketPC - mobile version of Windows)
One would imagine that for a country that invented the nuclear bomb, put a man on the moon, sent 2 robot explorers to Mars, that their people would be technologically provided for too.
Personally I would still get a PDA for PDA things, and a phone for phone things. I don't want my PDA to be gone just because I sent my phone in for servicing, or vice versa. However, I don't mind having a camera or even a video recorder on the phone. I just need to worry about getting a memory card huge enough to store all the pictures and video :)
Doesn't this kind of remind you of Star Trek?
Technorati tags: Quirky Singaporeans, cell phones, technology
Geesh, after all these weeks, you'd think the furor over Tammy would be over by now. Anyway, back to what I was talking about - Singaporeans and our handphones.
Now, what's a phone? Yeah it's something Alexander Graham Bell invented so we can talk to people that isn't in the same room as us. What do we Singaporeans do with them? We send SMS on them! Oh yeah, ang mo's will call this "text-ing". They will say "I will text you the address" instead of what we'd say "I will SMS you the address". Pick an ang mo tourist off the streets in Sentosa - chances are they'd never even heard of "SMS", unless they're in the IT industry, in which case SMS means a completely different thing.
This evolution is pretty unique in Singapore and Malaysia. Haven't really seen this much activity in Hong Kong or Taiwan though. It might be because we've been spoilt since day 1 when Singtel, M1 and Starhub all offered free SMS. Ang mo's don't have free SMS - they pay like 5 to 15 US cents per message sent. If we use our handphones and call people, we PAY for the call, and they also PAY for the call (unless he has free incoming calls, another pretty unique Singapore feature). Singaporeans are well known to be kiasu and so we always use the free things. I tell you, ang mo's will be mystified why we'd rather thumb-cycle on our phones to talk to someone else when calling them is technically faster.
This also kind of changes our social interactions with one another too - I remember back when I was a teenager, to be able to get the girls phone number (home phone number mind you! Nobody has a handphone back then!), you're halfway there! Now, nobody bothers about getting her home phone number. We want, nay, need her mobile phone number! Why? So we can SMS love messages to her. It's much safer, you can do it when you're in class, in the bus, in the loo, etc etc. Nobody can overhear you!
Of course the danger is when her current boyfriend happens to be playing with her phone and receives your SMS - then YOU ARE DEAD MEAT hahaha! He will know who you are (your name is in the phone's addressbook) and what you said to her (the smoking gun- the text message you sent!). Of course the hypothetical situation I have presented here can be easily reversed for guys. A girl sends you love SMSes, your wife finds out - you're a man with debts soon (the "alimony" syndrome).
Then now we have phones with cameras that are getting better and better all the time. They are up to 2.1 megapixels now. Who needs a digital camera anymore? You can see schoolboys hanging out at Starbucks (what happened to MacDonald Kids??) sneaking to take pictures of "chio bu's" that walk past them. And, the girl won't be the wiser cos the kids can pretend to be SMSing someone.
I remember once, in one of those forums I frequent, someone from the USA was saying something like "Damn, does everyone in Japan have a camera on their phones?". Yes my friend, everyone in Asia does. Why? Because we're using the GSM network. Phone manufacturers make GSM phones FIRST, then they might think about making a special, custom CDMA version for you guys in USA. Don't whine about how Nokia or Sony Ericcson should make that phone available to you because, you can't use it. The whole freaking world is on GSM! So get off your butts and demand your local provider to switch to GSM. It's a pain for us to get a triband phone so we can auto-roam when we go to the USA you know? Do you know you're one of the very few people left in the whole world who haven't gone metric yet? Our pilots have to learn to think and miles, feet, knots instead of kilometres and metres just cos we fly your F5s and F16s.
Now, there are signs that phones are converging with PDAs. Some phones like the XDA or Treo650, are both a PDA and a phone. If the XDA ever get hung, I can imagine this situation:
Person 1: "oie oie wait ah my phone hang leow... I need to reboot the phone!"
Person 2: "wah lau eh faster lah!"
(XDA runs on PocketPC - mobile version of Windows)
One would imagine that for a country that invented the nuclear bomb, put a man on the moon, sent 2 robot explorers to Mars, that their people would be technologically provided for too.
Personally I would still get a PDA for PDA things, and a phone for phone things. I don't want my PDA to be gone just because I sent my phone in for servicing, or vice versa. However, I don't mind having a camera or even a video recorder on the phone. I just need to worry about getting a memory card huge enough to store all the pictures and video :)
Doesn't this kind of remind you of Star Trek?
Technorati tags: Quirky Singaporeans, cell phones, technology
