Can the smartphone outsmart the payphone?

I had completely forgotten the Cardphone, the posh version of a coin-operated payphone.

View from ... the Phonebox

In the bigger scheme of things, what will come of the smartphone? 

We're practically glued!

Will there be a time for fond memories of swiping up, scrolling down? Or misty-eyed reminiscence of not-spots, hot-spots and deadzones?

Or musing how teenagers were able to walk, eyes down on screen, yet still avoid a head-on collision?

Perhaps the age of the smartphone will never end but the likelihood is its time will pass just as it’s passed with all other types of communications technology.

I was reminded of all this whilst reading a passage in the excellent novel Possession by A.S. Byatt, published in 1990. 

Holding your nerve when there's a queue outside

It refers to a cardphone – a public telephone box where you slotted a pre-paid phonecard into the machine before you dialled. 

I was a regular user of these yet had completely forgotten about them. In their time were the cutting edge in consumer technology. 

Now belongs in a museum

Strangely, the era of the phonecard also coincided with the worst of times for phone boxes many of which became smelly, vandalised and squalid places to be.

“…. he found a cardphone box that had to be functioning because it had a long queue.” it says.

Yes – so frustrating to tramp the streets of north London trying to find a phone box that worked.

Someone, Byatt says  “… played some complicated trick on the phone box with her car keys and talked interminably”.

Yes, this!

And eventually pacing around the phone box “like hyenas, threatening eye-contact”

Yes, this too! 

once a common sight

But I remember these as tactics played on YOU as a caller. Phone box politics meant that you had to somehow resist being intimidated by the “hyenas” outside and hold out on conducting the “my news” and “your news” pleasantries inside the hallowed cubicle.

But then one day, without noticing, they disappeared. Gone was the phonecard box (which I think by this time had merged with its coin-based poor relation into one machine), passed into oblivion, replaced by the smartphone.

These days if you find a phonebox it’s more likely to be a defibrillator station or a second-hand book stall with an honesty box.

So will the same fate happen to the smartphone? Only time will tell…