mobile phones

Textspeak

Niall O'Donnell 23 Comments

Or txtspk I suppose, only, do so many people really use textspeak anymore, and therefore, is textspeak perhaps now more appropriate? I was thinking about this recently when someone communicated with me in classic txtspk, as in things like hi how r u, I wnt 2 da suprkmarkt 2day, it was gr8! It surprised me, partly because it wasn’t in a context in which I’d normally expect to encounter textspeak. Mostly though, it surprised me because it made me realise that I hadn’t come across someone using textspeak in a long time…

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Roaming Charges

Niall O'Donnell 6 Comments

On Thursday 15th June 2017, roaming charges were abolished within the EU. And there was much rejoicing. Roaming charges were one of those things that for a long time I kind of just accepted. Living in Ireland, the rest of Europe usually felt far away enough that it seemed somehow appropriate that using my phone would be more expensive whenever I went there. But recently I drove for about 45 minutes from Belgium to the Netherlands, and suddenly it seemed entirely absurd that I had to pay a fortune (rather than nothing) for using data, just because I’d crossed a fairly arbitrary line. Why should it cost more in a different country? Was I inconveniencing the phone company in some way? Did they have to do more work to drag the data over the border and into my phone?

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What Phone do You Have?

Niall O'Donnell 8 Comments

A pretty easy answer for most of us nowadays, but one that’s obviously changed over time. In fact, a lot of devices which were originally called telephones might not be recognisable as such by today’s standards. Continue reading →

Smile! :-D

Niall O'Donnell Leave a comment

I miss smileys. Specifically, I miss the old simple ones you could create on your Nokia brick, or in your college emails. I probably didn’t appreciate them at the time. As a pretentious 17-year old, I no doubt looked down on such a corruption of language! How could people be so lazy as to use a crude little picture to represent what they could easily convey with words, if they just took a moment to think about it. It was the death knell for the English language, and blah blah blah!

But then, probably in the mid-2000s, and probably on MSN Messenger, I saw something remarkable. I typed in a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis, and when I hit enter, they transformed, transcended simple punctuation, and became something truly other: a bright, beaming, yellow little face. How did I do that? I thought. Did I break the computer!? After a little tentative experimentation, I realised that the computer was rendering my little faces as it presumed I wanted them to look: in a better-looking, more comprehensible form. And I understood that. Only, it still didn’t sit well with me… Continue reading →

App

Niall O'Donnell Leave a comment

I generally prefer to avoid using abbreviations, as long as it’s not too awkward or difficult to use the longer form. It’s just a case of style really. I understand the need for abbreviation in language, but sometimes abbreviations can just seem too lazy, too short.

Which is why I’ve been trying to use the word application lately, rather than app. It’s just not working out though. First of all, no-one else is using it, and app just seems to be more appropriate. Mobile phones are so small, and apps can seem so ephemeral (especially to me, because they don’t have any real physical existence, which is something I’ll never quite be able to get my head around), that the short and simple app just seems right. At least application still has its own exciting life of job and college applications to enjoy!