Trunk Calls

I am the curse of phone shop salespersons.

Their training and structured patter, cloaked in a "you guys" type familiarity is for nought faced with the combination of my old fashioned ideas and perceptions of what a mobile phone should do.

They come at me with promises of endless text capacity, an infinity of data availability, a carefree roaming facility and many other features that would, in others, cause amazement and incredulity.

All I really want, all I really, really want is a phone on which to make calls, oh and a high pixel camera, plus a reliable torch light would be useful.

That was my firm decision until I was introduced to a new generation smart phone.

I never imagined that the innovations now found in the guise of a phone could be useful let alone be incorporated in such a compact personal device.

I will not, for my age group in the 50 somethings, be alone in marvelling at being told where I am through the integrated Global Positioning System, having access to the vast internet of everything (I like the joke that a friend of mine is on the internet and claims that he has nearly finished reading it), being able to get information on the weather, data on health, sending and receiving e-mails and other forms of messaging.

This is down to the technology in a smart phone that can detect sound, light,motion,touch and direction, far expanding most of the human senses with which most of us have to their full extent.

There is however one glaring omission to the specification of the phone and that is the inability to smell.

It appears that many manufacturers and scientists have been working on this new direction for some considerable time but this has only really become evident to the commercial world in more recent years with the granting of Patent , most prominently the US20150308996A1 (pending) by the massive Samsung Corporation under the title of an "olfactory sensor".

Research and studies have struggled to comprehend sufficiently well how humans and indeed the animal kingdom detect and interpret smells. It was only 12 years ago that a Nobel Prize was awarded in this sphere of understanding.

A phone with an ability to smell opens up endless possibilities as it becomes a portable electronic nose.

There could be benefits to diagnosis of health conditions, detecting if foodstuffs have spoiled, advising on aspects of personal hygiene, early warning of disease, pollutants, toxins or dirty bomb radiation, showing traces of what we have eaten and drunk and even in this scary world of today sensing fear in a terrorist.

The applications are many but equally so the scale of the technology required to make them an achievable reality.

The problem with is that, unlike the grounding of light and sound as forms of energy, smell is an entity of mass.

Coffee is often cited to illustrate the complexities of smell analysis as the average daily latte or espresso is made up of around 600 smell elements.

The encorporation of current sensor capability under the coffee example would make for a suitcase sized mobile phone, and who wants to return to such luggage based apparatus as once existed in the 1980's.

Those companies trailblazing in olfactory detection are looking at narrower goals and one approach is the compiling of a digital library for each odour and essence which could retain the means of identification we have become well used to with sounds and pictures.

I am excited at the prospect of a smell feature on a smart phone and that it could prove to be more useful to me than even a camera or torch.

Of course, there would have to be strict controls on potential for misuse of a mobile phone smell sensor.

I can foresee a time when one of my favourite life rules will be obliterated by such an innovation.

There will be no more legitimate use of the "who smelt it, dealt it" defence and that, in my opinion, will be a very, very sad day indeed