Europeans interact with their tech gadgets in ways that can only be described as 'foreign'. It is an affectation that has entirely consumed the European continent. Having just returned from the Annual Dabbsy Trek into the Great Jungle Beyond Brexit Borders, I think I have found where this fashion for holding smartphones at right-angles to your head comes from. In fact, the only reason Motorola kept making flip phones, the technician assured me, wasn't to extend the device from ear to mouth but because someone high up at the company was a Star Trek fan.Ī trip to the Twilight Zone with a support guy called Iron Maiden READ MORE The mic doesn't have to be pointing at your mouth, it just needs to be anywhere alongside your cheek. As cab drivers and on-the-road sales executives already know, a mic can pick up your voice as vibrations through your jaw. Much later, I can remember interviewing a senior technician at Motorola who expressed his frustration at the public misconception that mobile phones had to be long enough to stretch from ear to mouth. You spoke into one end of the club and noises came out of the other, and you held it against your head to experience both simultaneously. I was raised by analogue wolves in the Neobakelite era in which a telephone was a heavy plastic club attached to a big box by a spiralled cable that would mysteriously and spontaneously twist itself into Gordian knots between calls. I guess I'm just old school when it comes to telephones.

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