It's funny how systems advance, cater to the user's needs, evolve, and eventually find more complicated ways of doing what they did so well in the first place. It's even funnier when people don't seem to realize that it's happening.

This morning's case-in-point is a CNN article on Nokia's phone-net strategy. The article is titled "Nokia steps up pressure with 'chat' phone". Now, just for a second forget that you're a geek and put yourself in the shoes of a normal person:

• Normal: Aren't all phones chat phones?
• Geek: No, this is really new!you can send messages to people and back!
• Normal: You can't talk on a normal phone?
• Geek: Oh, "chat!" Haha, funny. No. What this does is let you instant-message chat! See now? It lets you chat by typing!
• Normal: Why is this good?
• Geek: Because you can connect with anyone, anyhwere, over the Internet!
• Normal: So, anyone in front of a computer, right?
• Geek: Yeah, or anyone else with one of these phones!
• Normal: Why wouldn't I just call them?
• Geek: Well, say you're in a meeting, now you can chat during the boring meeting without it being obvious that you're not paying attention.
• Normal: Do you really think I can't tell the difference between when you're using your pilot to take notes and when you're using it to play klondike? Now try typing on the 10-digit keypad and convince me you're contributing to the discussion.
• Geek: Well, you could always use it while driving to let people know you'll be late...
• Normal: sigh...

Anyhow, a little longwinded, but hopefully I make a point. Now that chat rooms are starting to support voice, marketing decides that it only makes sense that voice devices are supporting text chat, especially when you can bill by the byte.

Actually, the funniest part of this whole phenomenon is how marketing can get people to put up with things they'd never normally tolerate. The Newton wanted you to print a little neater so it could understand your handwriting and people wouldn't tolerate that. Graffiti came out for the Newton (before anywhere else) and people berated it, saying it was ridiculous to learn new letterforms just to input text. Then the Palm comes out and people LOVE it, even though Graffiti is the only stroke-based input method available! Soon it's hip to know Graffiti.

Even worse, Dvorak keyboards have been at a standstill for decades, even though they're 10-20% more efficient than Querty keyboards. People don't want to switch because it's too much work, but now people are putting up with the slowest, most painful, concentration-stealing 10-digit cellphone numeric-to-alphanumeric input method, one that requires (counting...) FOURTEEN buttonpresses just to get an '@' symbol (Nokia 51x0), and they think it's super cool that they can send a two line email that took them 12 minutes to compose!

What's next? Java applets that run on your phone allowing voice-over-ip tunneled through your cellphone connection, billed by the K?