Remote possibilities

On the T-Mobile website they proudly claim that their coverage reaches 99% of the UK population. I think I know where the 1% of the country that can't get reception is – it is seat 17 in coach A of the 16.10 Virgin Voyager train from Leeds to Coventry, a journey which takes just over two hours and passes through large towns and cities such as Sheffield, Derby and Birmingham.

The signal from T-Mobile is appalling on this stretch of the country, rendering effective use of my Blackberry damn near impossible. Blessing or curse? You decide.

Much more so than any other device since the mobile phone, the Blackberry has revolutionised how we work, providing the user with the ability to check, send and receive emails without needing a comparatively cumbersome laptop and 3G card. However it's not colloquially known among users as the Crackberry for nothing – these things are addictive like nothing else. I found myself getting really angry on the train today when I couldn't send any messages because the little bars in the right hand corner kept disappearing, first counting down bar by bar to be replaced, like a dying man's final breaths, with a feeble 'SOS', and then a cross implying said man had faded away. None of the messages were urgent, and yet the fact that I couldn't send these damn messages was getting me really stressed.

I've fallen for the charms of the Blackberry like most users. I've found myself getting woken up in the middle of the night to change our daughter's nappy and thinking on the way back to bed 'Might as well check to see if there are any new messages', or taking a look at the weekend – just in case. I once came back from a social event with some other guys from work and decided to check my emails before bed; in my inbox was a message from a stroppy client which I needed to raise with two other colleagues, so I forwarded it on. A minute later both replied. It was half past midnight. That's just not right.

Like most users, I swore I'd be able to resist the temptations of the Blackberry, but within a few days of taking delivery of my shiny blue handheld I was hooked. I have to check my emails every thirty seconds or so, and by compulsion more than anything feel a need to respond to the emails that come in within seconds of them landing. On the one hand this is a more efficient way of working, but it also makes it more pressured, particularly if you're communicating with another Blackberry user also compelled to respond as quickly. The result is the kind of clipped, rapid-fire exchange of gibberish employed involuntarily by chemically-altered individuals. A client of mine mentioned that he'd put in a request for a Blackberry; I counselled him, like some wizened old washed-up veteran addict, not to fall into the trap of checking it too frequently or outside of working hours. He said he'd be disciplined, but he'll realise how futile such resistance will prove to be. We all start with the best intentions, we all say we won't fall for its charms, and we all succumb to the temptations of that keypad and LCD screen, all try and type as quickly and frantically as possible. In a few years thousands of people will develop knackered thumbs and they'll have to respond with a Blackberry derivative for the thumbless masses which allows you to communicate telepathically.

And when that battery goes flat, you'll experience an intense withdrawal and a cold sweat as you suddenly find yourself disconnected from the world. You can't go cold turkey with this, man. You gotta withdraw slowly. There aren't clinics for this. Yet.

The Blackberry can also be used as a conventional mobile phone although you do feel pretty bloody stupid putting what looks like a pocket calculator to your ear, and God knows what the radiation would do to your brain over time. And thus, because of its limitations as a permanent phone, I leave the house not just with my Blackberry, but also a conventional mobile too. Addictive qualities aside, the Blackberry does fix some of my pet hates about mobiles. For example, while I couldn't send the emails above straight away, at least they sat there patiently waiting for the signal to tick up again and then sent themselves automatically. Why they can't do that with good old SMS messages is quite beyond me, and unless they've fixed it with newer phones than my trusty Nokia then there's no outbox where messages sit until the signal's strong enough to allow the SMS to go. Instead you watch the screen tell you for several seconds that it's trying to send the message, it then fails and then YOU have to hit send again and potentially go through the same rigmarole again - which would have been quite painful on that train, I can tell you.

I read an article in The Times Saturday Magazine recently regarding mobile phones, and the way that they have become so complicated to use.

I was reminded of this when trying to make a call this morning. I rang a work colleague back in the office and was greeted by his voicemail which advised me he was out of the office and gave me the number of his PA. I frantically scrabbled around in my pockets to find a piece of paper and pen to get her number in order to phone her instead.

With fingers crossed that the number I had written down quite unintelligibly was indeed her number, I plugged the numbers into my Nokia and hit connect. Thankfully she was there, we spoke, and finally I took the phone away from my ear and looked fleetingly at the screen before pressing disconnect. There, in simple black text was her name. It seemed this had happened once before and I had already added her number into my phone's memory.

I'm sure I detected a hint of smug satisfaction as her name disappeared off the screen with the pressing of the disconnect button, as if my phone were saying to me 'Hah! I knew you were dialling her number, but instead of reminding you halfway through so that you didn't have to finish pressing the numbers in, I let you type in the whole number...and then let you know that you'd already stored that number, thus wasting you precious time!'

Phones have become more complicated with the advent of 3G facilities, cameras and the like, and I daresay I know how 1% of my comparatively basic phone actually works, but in some respects the basic nuts and bolts of a phone – you dial a number, you speak, you hang up – haven't changed at all. I was always pretty technologically switched-on as a teenager but these days I feel as technically limited as my parents (who haven't worked out how to watch DVDs on their DVD player yet). Who knows what technology will be like when our daughter is old enough, but I can guarantee she'll be showing me how it works.

I don't suppose that your Nokias, Motorolas and Sony Ericssons of this world really think that there is much left to do with the actual phone process itself, instead focussing more on style and the number of features they can cram onto a phone template that needs to be smaller than the previous model. They have succeeded in pimping the phonebox into a high-tech entertainment system when at the day it's just a phone. TV on a phone must look pretty small, while why would you store 100 MP3s when you could get a basic iPod for the same price?

Yet, despite such advances, something as simple as predicting which number you want to dial based on the first few numbers you've typed - given that phones have been able to offer predictive text for yonks - hasn't been added. Or maybe it has and I just need to trawl through fifteen menus and thirty submenus just to switch it on.

So, frustrations aside, you can give me a hit of that sweet Blackberry any day. One more go can't hurt, can it? I'll tackle that addiction another day.