Mannerisms

After the miseries of getting a £150 bill for data downloads and roaming charges, as a result of buying, and foolishly using, my new £170, 3G, phone I have bought a MotofoneF3, a cracking little number costing £14.95 on a Pay-As-You-Go deal.

It's a third of the width and half the weight of my fancy £170 phone, and slips easily into a trouser pocket without you feeling it's there.

It has no camera, no MP3 player, no games. Pure bliss.

The fancy, £170 phone felt like a brick. It was uncomfortable in a trouser pocket. I dreaded pushing the Internet button which drained the cash like a blood-sucking leech.

No more. My MotofoneF3 cannot connect to the internet in any circumstances. It feels good, it's easy on the eye, people admire its looks much more than the fancy-nancy phone, it's incredibly simple to use, it has huge on-screen letters and numbers, it has a loudspeaker function and it's so slim you don't notice it in your trouser pocket.

The push button controls are so good that I suspect it has the capacitive sensing technology of Quantum Research of Southampton which has licensed its technology to Motorola. It has 16 days standby time and 8 hours talk-time.

The joys of the MotoF3 show how hollow all this utter bollox is which the industry has been talking about convergence. Next year the industry is expecting almost a third of all phones to be single-chip, basic, low-cost phones.

I have my MotoF3, my iPod Nano, my Nikon Coolpix. Occasionally I use a Blackberry for mobile email. Only rarely do I carry all four devices at the same time.

So why heave around redundant functionality in the name of convergence?