No soy envidioso de su teléfono celular

I take a beginning-level Spanish class four mornings a week. One day in class last week, la profesora asked who had a telephone with them. “¿Quién tiene un teléfono?” is how she phrased it, if I’m remembering the sentence and constructing it correctly, which is doubtful.

Probably everyone in the room had a phone, of course. A couple of my traditional-age compañeros (classmates) produced theirs and I -- no linguist but ever helpful -- eagerly withdrew my little Samsung flip phone from my pants pocket.

La profesora set the three phones on separate unoccupied desks and proceeded to ask people, in Spanish, por supuesto (of course), which phone they wanted. We were working on demonstrative adjectives (this, that, these, those) last week, so depending on how the phones were arrayed some people said they wanted este (this one) teléfono, some ese (that one), and others preferred aquel (that one over there).

“Nadie quiere tu teléfono,” la profesora commented as she handed me back my phone later, Spanishing the obvious. (Nobody wants your phone.)

There is nothing wrong with my phone, which I got free from T-Mobile two years ago. The problem was that it was matched up against a couple of models two or three times its size and with conspicuous keyboards of some type. It wasn’t so long ago, I seem to recall, that having an especially compact phone was a status symbol, not unlike having a star on one’s belly if one were a Sneetch. Times change, and I guess I’m behind them como siempre (as always).

I learned a lot about mobile phones this past week, and not just that mine is less than chic in multiple languages. I won’t bore you with my notes from Tuesday, when Charlie Nooney, head of MobiTV, told us all about telephone TV. To me the most amazing thing revealed that night was that Dr. North has never been inside a Wal-Mart.

Instead, let me bore you with notes from the assigned reading and the guest speaker we had in Thursday’s Social Dynamics class. Because many of you aren’t in that class. And because we had 63 pages to read and didn’t discuss any of it.

Our high-octane guest speaker was Travis Boatman, vice president, Worldwide Studios, EA Mobile, which is part other the video game goliath Electronic Arts. If Mr. Boatman is as fast with a game controller as he is when talking he must be invincible on Xbox.

He told us, rápidamente, that in 2006 there were 26 million video game consoles sold worldwide and 208 million PCs but nearly a billion mobile phones, which makes the cell phone the “most ubiquitous (can you have degrees of ubiquity?) software platform on earth.”

“Apple made the iPhone because it realized it would be killed by cell phones,” he said. Mr. Boatman also said he would not bet against Apple in the impending device wars because it will be many months before competitors like Nokia will even be able to catch up to the iPhone.

By far the most popular game for play on cell phones, he told us, is -- get this -- Tetris, which I figured had long since entered the public domain, like Santa Claus or napalm. Not so. There’s a company that owns it, TTC, which stands for The Tetris Company.

Our reading came from Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective by Annenberg’s own Manuel Castells, et al. Among many other things, I learned that early in the 20^th century industrial, workers would often save up money for years to buy a timepiece. They did this not so much because they needed a watch but because it was a status symbol.

The phenomenon was said to be akin to what researchers have found lately in China, where migrant workers sometimes save for year to buy a cell phone. A key difference, of course, is that timepiece only required winding. With the cell phone, you are continually pouring more money into the thing in the form of minutes.

The researchers calculated that the Chinese migrant workers spend one-fifth of their total income on cell service, and lousy service at that. Then as new cell phones come out, handsets become outdated in a couple of years and customers are compelled to update their phones with expensive new ones.

Estas costumbres extranjeras, no las entiendo. (I can’t understand these foreign customs.)