Dropping Calls

Nokia has seen the future of the cellphone and it is not a phone:

Harry Santamäki vows to take a sip of cod liver oil from the bottle on his desk if he ever utters the word phone.

That's odd, considering Santamäki works at Nokia, the largest mobile phone maker in the world.

"We are forbidden to call them phones," said the vice president of multimedia strategy and business development. Instead, they're "multimedia computers."

The decree reveals Nokia's vision of the cellphone future, one in which one device will manage your information, communication and entertainment needs — a single remote control of sorts for your electronic life.

I'd start chugging that cod liver oil, pal. I don't want my phone to run my life. All I want is to be able to make a phone call, which my crappy Verizon Wireless/Motorola cellphone refuses to do if the weather gets even remotely cloudy. So far, the only reliable phone I have ever encountered is my aunt's old wall-mounted rotary dial one from the 1960s (which she still has and which works perfectly). I have yet to use a phone--land or cell--that is an improvement on it.