Day after day, smartphones sit in your pockets,
bags, or holsters until required to perform for a few minutes before being
re-consigned to darkness and oblivion, That is until their owners get bored and demand
playtime. Absolute dependability is demanded, and year-by-year the performance
bar is raised. The threat of being cast aside for a new love is constant.
A new day is dawning, for iPhones, that is, and maybe,
just maybe, for the rest of us owners. Thanks to Romotive, your iPhone can
become truly mobile. An independent life is just over the horizon for them and
is no longer just a fantasy (1).
Romotive have designed a wheelchair for your iPhone
(1, 2). The phones headphone jack supplies the communication link and your
phone can drive itself about the place, scare your cat, bark at your dog or
otherwise take its place in the good life. This is as it should be in these
days of cell phone based democracy.
Now, the guys at Romotive, having set their iPhones
free, haven’t got much further than persuading them to act as go-betweens in
office romances by delivering flowers to pretty coworkers, but guys will be
guys, I guess.
The promise, of course, is that App Developers will
jump in with all sorts of applications so that your old iPhone 4, and the 4s
when the 5 reaches your hot sweaty hands, will be liberated into retirement and
allowed to run free around your accommodations making themselves useful in a myriad
of ways.
Imagine, with a mechanical arm, they could lift
themselves out of their chairs and place themselves on charging mats, and then be
off again in an hour to play each other at some multiplayer game or, if wanting
some personal time, go off into the corner and tweet wisecracks on your Twitter
account. Maybe even trundle into your bedroom for a candid photo of you snoring
to post on your Facebook wall.
