When I was a kid, a phone was two cooped-out milk tins connected at either end by a plastic string or a woollen thread used for plaiting hair.

Of course, the parents of rich kids in upper-class neighbourhoods had rotary phones. But even by the most generous estimates at the time, Nigeria had about 120k phone lines for a population of about 60 million.

That wasn’t a lot, and folks like me who only knew about plastic string phones didn’t bother with the luxury of envying the uptown babies.

All of that now looks like scenes from Bonanza. My five-year-old granddaughter and her kid brother can operate mobile phones light-years away from the first-generation Nokia handsets optimised mostly for text and voice calls.

Big tech companies are in a race to make that mobile phone in your hand more than just a tool for business, socials and networking. You’re probably already aware of Apple Intelligence, a multimodal, cross-platform artificial intelligence (AI) suite designed to ensure your everyday life is completely locked down in the Apple ecosystem.

Google has been quite busy with its AI features, too. Now, the Recorder app on your Android phone transcribes meetings in real time. You can even use features like Magic Compose to rewrite more creatively, professionally, or even more Shakespearean!

What does that mean? You’ll have to do better than spend tons of cash on high-end phones, mainly as a status symbol. What some people do with their phones is only a shade better than what I used to do with the plastic string phone I used in the hood in the 1970s!

Evolve, mate! Re-invent yourself! There’s a whole chapter on reinvention in my new book, Writing for Media and Monetising It, that you might find very useful. Get a copy, now!

#writeandmonetise!