Who needs a phone kiosk when you can have a mobile phone?

Feb 13 2008 by Bill Gleeson, Liverpool Daily Post

IMAGINE a city with no telephone boxes on its streets. Not easy, is it? Of course, there will always be some pay phone kiosks on our streets.

There may even be some legal requirement to keep some somewhere, but, just as we have seen some conventional phone boxes turned into "money boxes" where telephones have been stripped out and replaced with Automatic Telling Machines, so we should not expect them all to last forever.

Instead, as our mobile communications capacity grows still further, we will look after our own requirements.

Mobile communications really have transformed our world and the way we live and work in it.

The speed of R&D in this sector has been on another level. And, crucially, the speed with which new products have been brought to market (and we are talking very, very big markets) has also been a modern phenomenon.

Next time you are out in the city centre – or pretty well any district shopping area anywhere in Merseyside – pop into a mobile phone shop.

I'll wager you will notice two things. One that it is busy – regardless of time or location and, two, that the technology on offer is enough to challenge even the brightest of minds.

This week, the sort of stuff we can probably expect to see in this type of shop in a year or so has been unveiled at one of the biggest mobile gizmo trade fairs in the world.

Barcelona is the place to be right now if you want a glimpse into the not-too-distant mobile future.

So what is there to see at Mobile World Congress?

Well, there are phones from Nokia which will do away with conventional A-Z street maps, allowing users to be given accurate real time directions in a sort of sat nav for pedestrians.

There is much talk of adding the latest GPS technology to phones.

One leading manufacturer pitches this feature at the social networking generation – imagine your phone bleeping when you walk past a bar or restaurant where one of your friends is sitting having a meal or a drink. A function to ponder that one. And one many will want to be sure they can switch on and off.

The point about a lot of what is on display in Barcelona this week is that is illustrates perfectly the size and complexity of mobile markets all over the world. Browsing that website and others dealing with this hi-tech sector, I was struck by the fact that there appeared to be no limit to the technology.

And, happily, the advantages it brings are now reaching some of the world's poorest communities as well as some of the most sophisticated and wealthy.

The UN this week announced that almost half a million people – described by the organisation as among "the poorest of the poor" will soon be able to make mobile calls.

Most of them will never have seen a telephone box.

MATT JOHNSON is chairman of Mando Group.