Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 25 October 2002, 6:27 PM
Tuesday
Tuesday 22/10/2002
So Sendo's launching its brand new Z100 Microsoft-powered Smartphone, and much to my sceptical heart's surprise I actually warm to the thing. It's nice and light, very colourful, easy to use and has lots of potential. It crashes a lot too, but then this is a beta.
One of the best things about it, to an inveterate hacker such as myself, is that once you hook it up to a PC and sync to it you can start poking around with its constituent files. Lots of what the phone does is in XML files, just aching for a bit of text editing -- and here are the ring tones as Midi and .WAV files. I spend a goodly part of the short time allocated to writing a review of the thing just downloading odd noises for rings, text messages, incoming emails and so on. It's justifiable, I think, as each time I throw a new file into the phone it reacts in a different and unpredictable manner.
This opens a whole new gamut of annoyances for the noxious traveller. No longer are you limited to irksome techno tunes picked out in bleepy-bleepy, but the whole corpus of music can be raided for your ring-tone needs. Is the finale of the 1812 overture better than Ride of the Valkyries? Is the Penguin Café Orchestra's Telephone and Rubber Band more knowingly apt than the Incredible String Band's A Very Cellular Song? Charles on Reviews wants the Tardis noise, which I agree is tempting... but the trouble here is that from the small space of a cellphone speaker you can't get any decent bass. Anything audible has to be high pitched... unless we manage to invent the pocket subwoofer.
There is another alternative: ultrasonics. If you cross two ultrasonic beams, you get audible mixing effects at the point where they meet. The ultrasound itself can be emitted from a tiny aperture, but the effects can produce very deep notes. The one drawback is that the phone won't know where you are to set up the crossed beams -- so it'll have to sweep the immediate area in the hope of catching you. Of course, anyone else within range will also get a burst of the noise as the ultransonics whiz past like a lighthouse beam -- imagine the fun in a crowded train carriage when two or three of these go off at once! And there'll be no way to tell where the noise is coming from: you'll be perfectly safe, even as your fellow passengers degenerate into a fevered, maddened lynch mob.
I wonder if Sendo has realised it's going to be responsible for the fall of Western civilisation? Bin Laden can turn over under the duvet and hit snooze again...
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