No Dial Tone

Ever wondered why the cell phone doesn’t have a dial tone?

I found the reason in an excerpt from the book, The Idea Factor. Phil Porter made a deliberate decision (and a radical one for the time because it was the opposite of what people were used to) that a cell phone shouldn’t have a dial tone. So what were Porter’s reasons?

First, he didn’t want the caller to feel rushed while making a call. Think of how we scramble to dial the numbers on the landline, before the dial tone “expires” and you’ll know what Porter was trying to spare you.

Second, this approach cuts down on the time that a phone uses a connection: instead of starting from the moment you picked up the receiver, the connection happened only when you pressed Dial. Better bandwidth usage, in engineering speak.

As it turned out, the second reason is what allowed for SMS’s to come in later. How’s that, you ask? It’s because in SMS’s too, you type first, press Send later. To appreciate this point, imagine having to type your message before the dial tone expired. That’s hard enough to do with the digital keyboard of a smartphone; imagine how impossibly difficult it would have been in the pre-smartphone era where you just had 10 keys to cover the entire alphabet!

By luck or by design, Porter made a very smart choice, didn’t he?

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