What Does Your Mobile Phone Say About You?

What Does Your Mobile Phone Say
About You?

Oliver Cox takes a look at how your phone might reflect your
personality.  

With no great purpose in mind, I’ve
decided to assemble my biased views on mobile phones, their owners and the

connections between. This is completely my own opinion and I encourage you to
make it known if you disagree.

Our mobile phones, like many of the
material possessions which we like to collect, can give a bulk of information
on our attitudes to others. Phones can say so much that it’s important that
your phone is not a confession, but rather a way of putting across what you can
offer.

Screen

When, in the early nougties with
microprocessors and microtechnology allowing more compact devices, people’s
mobile phones got smaller and smaller; the size of one’s phone supposedly
representing the inverse of one’s status/earning potential. However, since the
mid-point of the previous decade, especially since the release of the iPhone in
2007, the opposite has been the case. Partly due to the improvements in LCD
screen technology, phones are growing, with the proportion of the phones
surface which is taken up by the screen the prime factor.

Call me impressionable, but when I
see a big, high-quality screen, I’m wowed. It makes a phone seem cool and says
the same for the owner.

Keypad/Touchscreen

Phones with keypads are a subject
of contention during this, the touch-screen renaissance. One might say that
someone who chooses a phone with a keypad is the more mature for not swooning
at a fun toy. Nevertheless, a touch screen is such a great tool that for me,
those who refuse them may come across more as being a little too anachronistic
to adopt a very productive interface.

People who own phones which try to
combine both…make up your mind!

Operating System

Android
– Says to me that the user is prepared to accept greater responsibility over
the workings of their phone in return for more customisability, and that I can
credit them with having worked out how to operate the slightly opaque
interface. 

Blackberry
OS – This may have been a good system in 2008 but, despite having received some
valuable updates recently, people who use this OS probably do so
because they want a Blackberry’s keypad.

iOS –
People who use iOS come across as individuals who would trade their power over
the workings of a system in order for it to look amazing and work easily.

Windows
Phone – Windows Phone 7 provides an interface which is genuinely distinct from
its competitors (unusual for Microsoft), which would make me admire an owner
for choosing a more original product.

Cases

It is important to keep one’s phone
safe, but when a person shells out more than £20 on a case to protect their
phone, they may care about it a little too much.

When I see brightly coloured/fluorescent
cases or ones with a design, I find it hard to see the owner as being
particularly serious. Within these parameters, colours have their traditional
influences e.g. red for power.

Apps

For iPhone, Android and to an extent
Blackberry users, their app choice broadcasts a lot of information on their
character to everyone. The Disco-ball app, the Lightsaber app and that
perverse app which lets the user drink a virtual pint should all be confined to
home use if the person who owns the phone for some reason decided to get them,
which they shouldn’t have. These apps will tell the world that your hobbies
include partaking in gimmicks and in wasting time.

Apps also have the potential to
impress, obviously according to the person’s occupation. Apps by which I would
be impressed include a travel planner for someone whose work involves many
journeys for meetings, or the WordPress app for a committed blogger.

Smartphone?

With so many, 41%,UK phone sales now contributed by
smartphones, it will be comparatively rare to find someone in business who does
not own one. Someone who doesn’t would make me wonder why one would have chosen
to be without some of the massive advantages in connectivity which these phones
offer. It may make one seem slightly quaint.

Nevertheless, if there is no
conceivable need for someone to own a smartphone, they would be best to wear
their heart on their sleeve for the tech fanboys to peck at and not get one. It
could be refreshing to have a colleague who doesn’t periodically pull out their
phone to fiddle with apps or to check their stock.

Conclusion

Conveniently, for each job or group
of people whom you’re trying to impress, there is a phone and set-up which will
match – to say nothing of the phones and set-ups which will impress no one. So
remember your phone’s public face for work and, if you must, only indulge in
virtual pints from your phone in its fluorescent green case in the comfort of
the home.