K. Ananthan

Seeing is believing.

One of my close friends and colleagues made it a point to button-hole me after reading the last instalment of ‘Come Again’: his contention was that sending e-mails and texting are quite different from actually creating a document in a mobile phone.

Well, you should know by now that your correspondent will take up any challenge in the field of personal technology, and so what you are reading now was typed out in a mobile phone in a moving vehicle.

And I have to admit that it wasn’t half as bad as I expected it to be. in fact, I think I enjoyed typing it out on the mobile phone because I threw a new scare into my wife: that it is quite likely that I will switch off her commute rhetoric by claiming to do office work.

But seriously, while this isn’t the fastest ‘Come Again’ instalment I have written, it certainly isn’t the slowest. I meant the typing speed, of course, not the time taken to get an idea in the head.

I think the slowest was when I tried to do one-finger typing rather than the then-normal two-finger hunt-and-peck. The current style is more of a two-thumbs press-it-and-pray.

It’s pray rather than hope because it is as difficult as pressing ctrl-alt-del with just one hand to edit a document without cursor control keys, text selection, and the delete key. Oh, and typing special characters is a pain in the left thumb.

And just because I love dogs and brought them into the picture last week: You can teach this old dog these new tricks!

(For the record, the copy was typed in and filed using a Nokia e61i.)

N. Nagaraj

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