Customising Your Mobile Phone

During the past decade mobile phones have grown from a luxury product to a must-have-item and they`ve developed to include all kinds of special features such as cameras, MP3 players, and WAP or 3G internet access.

As mobile phones have afforded us more exciting functions, we in turn have become more demanding and now almost everyone has done something to make their phone unique. The ways in which we customise our phones is endless. We add dangle charms, choose outlandish colours, keep them in fabric mobile phone covers, but on the inside, they are even more customisable.

The phone`s background wallpaper can become an image of lovers kissing or a friend pulling a silly face, the `screensaver` too can be an image of anything the owner wants it to be; rendered in bright back-lit full-colour glory. Then, there`s ringtones (some of which are more annoying than others,) themes, third-party applications, calendar entries... The list goes on and on.

What does all this add up to? Your mobile phone has become an expression of your personality. What you choose to make your screen background and whether you scuff and scrape your handset or keep it highly polished all tell the world and yourself reams about your own personality.

More Than Phones

The most popular mobiles right now are the ones which are highly customisable. `Smartphones` is the term which the mobile phone industry has coined in order to describe phones like the iPhone and Blackberry. They`re `smart` because they can do so many things that ordinary phones can`t, although, some people would probably call them super-phones.

These are the phones of the future. They let us set dates in our diary, research restaurants and then find them using GPS, we can set reminders, send photo-messages, compose and send emails and get on social networking websites (or indeed any website we like.)

Certain Nokia handsets and the iPhone will let you access websites such as YouTube in order to watch seamlessly streaming video and have large enough storage devices built-in to hold several movies and many more music albums at any given time.

The Future of Mobiles

Ten years ago, we could never have dreamt mobile phones like these were possible and with them becoming increasingly common and increasingly customisable it`s starting to seem like mobile `phone` is not the right word for them any longer. They`re more than telephones (in fact, many of us rarely use smart phones for calls!) they`re lifestyle tools.

The more we get from our phones the more we demand from them. Now that we`ve hit a recession we want mobile phones deals that include cheaper calls or more of them for our money. We want better handsets, more room to store music and movies, better interfaces (hence the current touchscreen boom) and we want it all now. In the future, mobiles will be even more indispensible and we`ll be able to do things with them that right now, we can`t even imagine.