Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

It is amazing how far technology has come.

Norwich called yesterday (I had heard about a particular shop there, but I also just wanted to look around). It’s a few hours away from where I live, so was a day trip. The kind of day trip that’s one point brave and two parts foolish: I had never been there before, had no idea where anything was, and – since I was getting the train there – it came with a very real risk of getting lost.

Thankfully, I didn’t get lost. Every bit of that is down to my phone, which has Google maps on it, and a tremendously useful GPS.

It’s with phones, much more than anything else, I think, that this James Bond-ish quality of the modern technology really comes into its own.

Of course, there are some things that business and office telephone systems can do better. There are some that can do all sorts of ridiculous things – much more than the simple offering of broadband. And that’s another mark of how far technology has come.

It’s a little bit like the tech that the new BT television systems are offering: TV on demand, and some I’ve seen are even offering 3D capabilities, that sort of thing. And if the movie experience in the cinema is anything to go by, that is going to be something worth keeping an eye on: I remember being forced to blink and move back slightly when objects were flying out of the screen towards me, the other day.

But smartphones are still the thing that impress me the most. What they can offer you in something so small, stashed away in your pocket is quite frankly mind-boggling. Most of it comes down to internet on the go. It is the stage for everything else to build upon.

It’s not like that mobile broadband you can get, where you shove a usb stick into a laptop, and tend to battle with fluttering, unstable connections and tediously slow speeds. It’s easy. It’s simple. It’s automatic.

And there is a beauty in that. I think I’m more impressed with my mobile than I was with my first Panasonic digital cordless phone, which was a bit of a lifesaver, if you recall.