Why are you holding your phone like that?
If you stop it now, that might just count as a 'Brexit bonus'
I don't like to do it sideways. I won't do it at any fancy angle. Call me conventional but what can I say? I'm a straight-talking kind of guy.
How hard does it have to be to get a firm grip on it… and hold it against the side of your face?
Oh right. Put that yoga manual down, you might have misunderstood my meaning. I was describing how I handle my mobile during a phone call: I position it against my cheek so that the tiny speaker near the top end roughly aligns with my ear, then I speak normally so that the sensitive directional mic at the other end can pick up my verbal intonations while compressing background noise.
I know! Cray-zee, eh?
On occasion, I'll be wearing earphones, in which case the smartphone remains in my pocket, my lap, my left hand or wherever while one of the electronic plugs in my ear collects vocal vibrations from my jaw.
Indeed, with apologies to long-suffering readers who hauled themselves over here for their weekly fix when I graciously parted company from The Register at the behest of equally long-suffering editors, I am going to trawl up one of my old bugbears (and some old photos).
When I look around at how other, younger people use their mobile telephic handsets, it is evident that I have been doing it wrong all this time. On public transport, in the streets and in my favourite hipster cafés, I can see that everybody else employs the following smartphone handling method to listen to what a caller is saying:
At first, I imagined this might cause a problem: surely if you hold your phone this way, the speaker is facing up into the sky rather than towards your ear, while the compressor mic at the other end is now situated several inches away from your head. This means it is less likely to pick up the thoughtful words you are saying than the verbal bollox of the moron sitting next to you.
Oh, but silly me! Apparently, whenever you want to talk, all you do is swivel the phone round like this:
I guess I'm just old school when it comes to telephones. I was raised by analogue wolves in the Neobakelite era in which a telephone was a heavy plastic club attached to a big box by a spiralled cable that would mysteriously and spontaneously twist itself into Gordian knots between calls. You spoke into one end of the club and noises came out of the other, and you held it against your head to experience both simultaneously.
Much later, I interviewed a senior technician at Motorola who expressed his frustration at the public misconception that mobile phones had to be long enough to stretch from ear to mouth. As cab drivers and on-the-road sales executives already know, a mic can pick up your voice as vibrations through your jaw. The mic doesn't have to be pointing at your mouth, it just needs to be anywhere alongside your cheek.
In fact, the Motorola technician assured me the only reason Motorola persisted making flip phones – right up to the moment when Apple changed the world with full-screen handsets – wasn't to extend the device from ear to mouth but (genuinely) because someone high up at the company was a Star Trek fan.
It was only on one of my pre-migration annual treks into the Great Jungle Beyond Brexit Borders that I discovered where this fashion for holding smartphones at right-angles to your head came from. It was an affectation that had entirely consumed the European continent long before the Covid lockdowns sent us all mental.
This came as no surprise. Europeans interact with their tech gadgets in ways that can only be described as "foreign". As a British interloper you just have to take it in your stride: remember to wear your pith helmet, don't drink the tap water, and don't stare at anyone holding their phone in an unnecessarily elaborate manner during calls.
Now I read that social media addicts have developed their own smartphone manipulation techniques particular to the channel they happen to be using.
According to the entirely trustworthy source JustBanter – a service that lets you converse with chatbots pretending to be celebrities I have not heard of – right-handed people who tend to thumb-scroll through their phone content are likely to favour Instagram. Apparently, left-handers prefer the screen layout of Facebook… which somewhat beggars belief since Facebook’s smartphone app UI is as appealing as handling broken glass.
Users who prefer clutching their phones with a single hand are Snapchat fans. Those who hold their phones with both hands are definitely using YouTube. And, it says here, Twitter is popular among right-index finger users.
JustBanter’s Chantry Somtun concludes that how a person holds a phone may be an extension of their personality. Such unconscious actions “can provide valuable insights about our preferred social realms”… which is another way to confirming that our very finger movements are about to be monetised and sold back to us. "Social media not only shapes our digital identity but also moulds our essence,” he says, “even as our fingertips dance across screens."
Well, it sounds to me like you’re dancing your fingertips over your own arse, mate, but what can I do about it?
Given that I will not be able to hold back the tide, I have decided to embrace the new ways of holding my mobile phone. In fact, I think I can embellish them with further options. Here, for example, is my suggested Continental method for watching video podcasts of Love Island. It lets you see right inside the video:
Mind you, if you are the type of person who watches such cultural artistry, you will certainly want to share your thought processes with as many fellow drones as possible. Allow me to recommend the following method of watching, which although you can't see the screen yourself, you force everyone else to see what an utter knobhead you are:
Or if you are listening to music without earphones, as almost every fucker insists on doing on public transport these days, here's how to listen in stereo:
Just sound and vision? Nah, let's get more senses into the act. Try interacting with your smartphone nasally:
For stylistic variety, I have already registered a couple of variations on the nasal theme for use when posting political abuse on social media. Here's 'The Adolf' ©:
And 'The Josef' ©:
And for those who insist on using their phones for commenting on the inane writings of Friday columnists at Autosave is for Wimps, I'll leave you with 'The Dabbsy' ©:
There are plenty more where those came from, I reckon. Now it's over to you to handle your handset and manipulate your mobile. Feel free to show me what you've got.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He plans to expand his initial foray into smartphone handling to other areas of creative device interaction. Forthcoming techniques from Dabbsy Developments include typing on a keyboard using your elbows, angling your computer display to face the ceiling, and manipulating your laptop’s trackpad using the small of your back.
Fortunately in South Africa we have slightly less foreign habit. The phone is held as in Diag.2 (speaking into the mic) but a little further away. That's it (The sound comes out down there too, when in "speaker" phone mode).
Fortunately (or unfortunately 🤷♂️) this is only done when an approximation of "hands free" is required, such as when operating earthmoving machinery (or driving in traffic, you know how it goes). Kind of a dead giveaway to the cops who if they spot you will confiscate the phone for minimum 24 hrs and fine you the equivalent of £100, half of which is the impound release fee.
Superb. I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks like this. One advantage of “The Dabbsy” is that with suitable application of force the content received audibly can be sent back into a more suitable location - aka “talking shit”.