The Last Gadget

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Iam writing this one on my new cell phone. Not typing letter by letter using one finger: that would be sheer, frustrating torture. Instead I bought a cheap little bluetooth keyboard in Tbilisi, downloaded an app which lets me write and manipulate a variety of text formats, and have this on my lap, with the phone’s screen beside me. Works like a charm!

This is all part of seeing what my phone can be used to do, a list of things which is growing alarmingly long when I consider both hardware additions and software ones. I started this list as a Samsung Notes item while on the way home to Svaneti by minibus. That short text I did type entirely onscreen, letter by letter, but this article is too long for such unnecessary bother, so here I am with the keyboard.

There are some things which I don’t have the money or interest to do my phone. The main one of these is serious photography. I already have an 18 MPixel 35mm digital SLR camera and several good lenses to go with it. Even if my new cell phone could take RAW format photos, which it can’t, I would have to cumbersomely adapt those lenses to it, and its own lens is tiny compared to the cropped 35mm frame my big camera has. So, no.

But, for example, I could add a thermal imaging camera onto the phone. This is a physical device which lets me see the color temperature of things, in either still shots or recorded video. Where this would be very useful is in tracking heat flow and loss in my big Svan house and better insulating those points where there is significant loss. Maybe a one-time process, but a very practical one.

Other things which either already exist or are on the sci-fi horizon but bleeding into our reality include:

- a wall-size projector for movies. In a cell phone? Coming soon! Also able to project its own virtual keyboard onto a small but fold-out flat surface, so I can eventually do away with the physical keyboard too.

- a laser pointer, not only for Power Point presentations but to do things like measure distances. I’ve been wanting to note the height of every tower in Svaneti and beyond, and this would be the thing, rather than a separate device, which already exists but is a) another expense and b) yes, another device to lug around. My goal is to cut down on the number of these!

- a molecular scanner. For foods, water testing, chemical analysis of various substances, etc.

- a vermin repeller, emitting sound to scare away anything from dogs to insects to rodents, each requiring its own frequency.

- a programmable remote control for the TV, computer, other smart devices around the home and elsewhere. Of course, it would have to by very well shielded against hacking, as would the things I wanted to control it with! This seems to be an ongoing escalating battle between attackers and defenders.

- a scanner in both 2D and 3D, of sufficiently high quality to save all my old photos in high detail and bit-depth. 3D, for objects to render by 3D printing.

- a library storage area for all my e-books, which I am already quite comfortable reading onscreen. Ditto for audio, in good enough quality to link to either wireless earbuds or speakers

- the aforementioned (in an earlier article) telescope and microscope, with analysis of what I’m looking at in either case.

- flashlight; mirror; glove warmer!

- of course, the “Oracle”, because it’s connected to Google, from where I can learn anything on the spot instead of having to memorize it.

- a fractal programmer, using free software which already exists, and renderer in sizes as large as time and electricity permit. This is a special niche interest of mine, but it points to the hobbies of anyone and how they can be followed using one’s phone.

All of these things, and the rest which I can dream up, make this little device really indispensable. So the next questions are, how can I a) back up data in case it gets lost, b) how can I find the phone itself when it does get lost (not if)? Because these things do happen, even in my own experience. If I make it so universally useful, I must go to some lengths to protect it too!

I am coming into these realizations rather late, as a recent smartphone adopter, but better now than never. My sci-fi readings are creeping ever closer to reality, and I hope to be there for the merge.

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1900 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:

www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti

By Tony Hanmer