How a cellphone is like a wisdom tooth

A pair of unwanted Mollarollas

The Skype app debuted in Apple’s app store last week.

Obviously, cellular carriers are nervous as all get out because everyone’s iPhone just gained the ability to place calls to just about anywhere over wifi, which means that when those first-gen iPhones’ contracts come up for renewal there’s a real chance many users will find themselves umotivated to keep paying for cellular network access (effectively erasing the difference between their iPhone and an iPod Touch of similar storage capacity).

So what? It’s the usual battle between technology making stuff cheap and easy and institutions that profit when stuff is hard. It’s going to end the way these things always end: the things we used to pay for now will become cheap and easy and people will find other ways to make money.

In the meantime, look what just happened to the cellphone.

What is a cellphone, anyway? The best I could come up with is this:

a cellphone is a device for realtime two-way audio communication over a wireless network that isn’t exactly the internet.

Describing the iPhone as a cellphone with various other applications is analagous to describing a PC as an electronic typewriter that also does other things: call it the iType. If it’s a cliché to say that the iPhone is so much more than a phone that it’s actually a pocket PC, then why is it (and the many devices similar to it) the size and approximate shape of the device it is not (its name notwithstanding)?

It really doesn’t have to be phone-size anymore, nor did it ever really need to be from a functional standpoint. But making it phone-like was a design decision that made it for, rather than ahead of, its time. Like all good design, that decision was an elegant reaction to a restriction: in a world of single-use devices, the universally useful device needs to be clearly for one thing if it’s to make sense.

It’s Swiss Army-multiple-use-collapsible-pocket-tool vs. Swiss Army knife.

But the restriction that made the iPhone a phone is fast on its way to obsolescence. The cellphone is a vestigial piece of technology. In the way that wisdom teeth remind us that we used to have much bigger jaws fit for chewing tough, raw plant matter, the cellphone shows how we used to transmit information wirelessly: vocally in realtime two-way exchanges.