Latest phone device is going to wrap me around its robotic finger

IBREAK all the rules with my mobile – switching it on during flights, checking messages on my bike, and flickering 24/7 on my nightstand. Yes, I know, a season in purgatory awaits me .... but it’s a love thing, you see. A few days ago I spotted the next treat destined to enliven this affair – a feely finger. A French researcher has invented a robotic finger that attaches to your mobile, allowing it wriggle across your desk and stroke your hand. Creepy? Not in my kama sutra, pal.

Marc Teyssier, a researcher at Telecom Paristech engineering school, wants to move us further along the interactive road: “When we talk with people in real life, we touch each other to communicate emotions, like a stroke on the arm. But for mobile devices, we don’t use touch at all. So my starting point was: how can we bring touch in human-computer interfaces?”

The end result is the MobiLimb robotic finger, which plugs into a mobile phone and looks like a real finger. Your friends can even activate it remotely to send you a comforting pat on the wrist down the phone line. Or even an admonishing digit wag if you’ve been naughty – the possibilities are endless.

We’ve come a long way since the world was introduced to the mobile phone in 1973 when Martin Cooper, a vice president at Motorola Communications, took the DynaTac prototype, about the size of a brick, for a lunchtime stroll around Manhattan. “Sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. I even crossed the street while talking, one of the more dangerous things I had ever done in my life.”

Mobiles caught on across the world like few other devices in history, and having the dosh to afford the €1,000 price tag was a statement you had arrived. Apart from their obvious virtues in delivering more efficient communication and personal security, mobiles opened new chapters in everything from shopping to adultery. Suspicious wives no longer checked for lipstick on the collar, but the telltale frequent dials on the monthly bill to reveal many a sordid situation.

In one of the best advertising campaigns for mobile ownership, 1987 movie ‘Wall Street’ plugged mightily into the macho desire for extra muscle in a pants pocket. When Michael Douglas, playing ultimate alpha male Gordon Gekko, barked orders into his FY8850, a million impressionable youngsters like myself ran screaming to the nearest mobile store.

Mobiles became a plot device in movies going back to ‘Jerry Maguire’ and ‘The Matrix’, and even more useful than guns to Nidge and his ‘Love/Hate’ pals. And when Barbie got in on the act, adding a ‘fizz pink’ cellular to her big bag, teenyboppers listened with rapt attention.

So, when you spot me next month at the window table in Bewley’s getting all touchy feely with my MobiLimb, don’t judge, OK – we got a thing goin’ on...