Mobile

There was a time, wasn't there, when phones were just...phones. You made calls on your plastic brick and that was pretty much it. If you were particularly techy you might try and store a few numbers in the built-in address book, but it was such a fiddly process, requiring multiple button presses to enter each letter, that very few people bothered. People talked proudly of not buying one of those new-fangled portable telephones. 'Why would you want to do that to yourself?' they asked.
It's all very different now. Our High Streets brim with mobile phone stores and everyone - pretty much everyone - carries around a powerful pocket computer. People debate their choice of mobile phone brand with your passionate intensity once reserved for football teams.
It has become a technology truism that modern mobile phones contain more competing power than was available to NASA during the Moon landings. And there seems to be no end to the functions we can cram into them: they're diaries, notebooks, calendars, camcorders, video players, alarm clocks, email editors, games consoles, music players, books, Internet terminals, carrier pigeons, status symbols, the go-to camera you always have with you....oh, and they make phone calls too.