Don't touch that phone!

If your New Year’s resolution was to cut down on text messaging, you might find it easier to keep your promise if you live in California. As of Jan. 1, a new law banning any use of short message service, e-mail or any other text-based communication behind the wheel went into effect in the Golden State — so no more driving with a cup of coffee in one hand and a BlackBerry in the other. You’ll just have to make do with the coffee.

I doubt any of you would fail to see the merit in such a law, though I suspect more than a few of you may be guilty of trying to catch up on work e-mail while caught in rush-hour traffic. What’s most interesting about laws like this, though, is what they say about how we use our mobile devices. The idea of being connected anywhere and everywhere has gone much further than just voice. We apparently want to remain in touch by SMS and e-mail just as much, if not more so, as we want to be able to make or receive a phone call at any time. E-mail used to be something we’d get at work or occasionally download via AOL or CompuServe maybe once an evening. Now it’s ubiquitous: E-mail and IM are our fingertips 24 hours a day.

Laws like California’s aren’t going to stop drive-by texting. It’s already too late. The tendency of our culture is to increase our means of access and grow our windows of availability, not inhibit them. Many people will merely continue to tap-tap-tap away with one eye on the road in violation of the law, just like many people ignore cell phone driving laws and don’t buy hands-free kits. But there will be many people that will solve the problem through technology, and there will be many companies that supply that technology. Mobivox wasted no time in promoting its speech-to-text technology to California motorists, issuing a press release on Jan. 1. Mobivox uses network-based voice recognition technology to generate SMS and short e-mail messages that can be sent by voice command to an address in a hosted address book — a service ideal for consumers. Other companies such as MyCaption and Vlingo have BlackBerry enterprise users covered.

I’m not saying it’s time to go and invest in speech-to-text or voice recognition companies. But I do know that the way we interface with our mobile devices is constantly evolving. T9 gave us a way to rapidly enter text on a 12-key number pad. BlackBerry and Palm gave us full qwerty keyboards. And Apple made it possible to navigate our increasingly complex phones without touching a button. We’ve come a long way in how we interact with our phones. The next logical step is to interact with them fully without touching them.