Where's the dumb phone?
(Editor's Note: Jeremy Roche, CNET.com.au's esteemed Mobile Guru is away from his desk all this week. Before we could get in a locum, the Mobile Phone Anti-Guru appeared, and refused to leave until he'd penned this week's column. You have been warned...)

According to internal statistics here at CNET.com.au, the readers (that's you folks, for the slower ones down the back) are keen on smart phones -- those hybrid phone/pda devices that not only make calls and run up enormous bills while your back is turned, but also keep contacts, accept PC data and apparently smooth out the lines of your expensive jacket when you're not busy pulling it out in order to impress your friends. What I want to know is -- where's the dumb phone?

It seems you can't turn around in any shopping centre without being hit with a mobile phone store -- I've long held the suspicion that the muzak they play in such places is purely in place to mask the popping sound being caused by mobile phone stores suddenly appearing, complete with suspiciously grinning salespeople -- and if you wander into such stores, you'll be hit with phones with cameras, phones with PDA functions and phones that come in more colours than the human eye should safely be exposed to. What you won't see, however, are phones that are.. just phones.

What I'm talking about, for those of you who can't comprehend a world without SMS, MMS or the ability to take surreptitious camera phone shots of the cleavages of women in pubs -- you're not fooling me that all the camera phones in the world are being used for innocent purposes -- is a phone with simple buttons that (shock! horror!) calls people. It could even be a revolutionary mobile device that actually had decent reception. Then again, if it had decent reception, the phone companies couldn't charge us all an arm and a leg for all those flag fees when we find ourselves cut off twelve times during a normal conversation, simply for the crime of wandering too close to an area of patchy coverage.

Perhaps I'm on the wrong side of this particular fence, and what people really want is a mobile phone that doesn't just take over your phone and PDA functions, but also expands at the touch of a button into a full-size, working Ferrarri Testarossa. I'm sure the clever folks at Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Siemens are busy beavering away on that one, just to show me what's...

(It was at this point that the combined staff of CNET.com.au leapt upon the Mobile Phone Anti-Guru, intending to move him away from the keyboard, only to have him vanish in a puff of blue smoke, leaving only behind ghostly laughter...)