The phone is taking over!

My first smartphone had implications for the other appliances I own but my recent upgrade to a Desire HD has signalled the real onset of a form of electronic colonisation in my life. The phenomenon occured to me in bed, shortly after retiring for the evening, when I noticed a surprising and at-first inexplicable resentment of my radio alarm clock. Thinking about it for a moment I realised I no longer wanted my alarm clock by my bed. Of course, my DHD is not the first phone I have had with alarm functionality. But it is the first phone I have had that has instilled in me the aggressive urge to consolidate all my electronic needs onto one device. Why should I use an alarm clock when I have my phone charging beside the bed? I thought. What is the point of sullying the area with unnecessary leads and clutter when my beautiful, portable phone does it all for me?

This thought brought with it the realisation that my phone was doing everything in its power to push everything else out of my life. The most obvious and immidiate casualty, and one that demonstrates that no appliance, no matter what status they hold in your life, is truly safe, is my Ipod: with the purchase of a 32gb SD card, the executive decision was taken that I would no longer carry around two gadgets, when one did the job. Obviously it has the added advantage of ensuring I do not miss phone calls when I am listening to loud music. The other obvious redundancy was my camera, although there will always be a time and a place for a dedicated camera and camcorder on special occasions, given the higher quality on offer, so perhaps in that instance redundancy is going a little too far. My old camera has been kept on in a consultant capacity.

The most tragic victim of the smartphone's increasingly expansionist domestic empire building is the laptop, which cuts a rather pathetic figure, lonely, all-but-forgotten in the corner of the room. For all the woes of the ipod, at least its fate was swift and sudden. Final. Like a top footballer whose career is ended prematurely by injury, it can, for all its sadness, reflect on a glorious career. But the laptop has seen its status reduced beyond all recognition, without the mercy of full retirement. It can go for weeks without being turned on or even thought of, before some task that can neither be done at work or easily on the phone comes up one evening and the poor thing has the dust blown off it and is brought back into the room. What is so bad about this? you might ask. It has, after all, retained a niche purpose, a role it can serve better than other products. And yet, like a warrior lying injured on the battlefield, slowly but surely bleeding out, its fate is inevitable. It is hard to see the laptop surviving the next generation of smartphones and tablets. Every day for the laptop is another day on electronic death row, without even the comfort of knowing the date of its execution.

The TV stands smugly, confident its 32 inch screen represents an offering no smartphone can ever hope to replicate or replace, but for its cousins, the remote controls, life is not so comfortable. The sky remote has already been stripped of one major responsibility, thanks to the Sky+ app. The fear has got to be that other functions will be lost over time.

Torches. Portable games consoles. Satnav. The list of territories conquored is already impressive. Your diary, note book, A-Z and newspaper would testify the injury has not been confined to the electronic. The question now is where it will end. The logical conclusion has got to be the complete elimination of all other electronic devices, so that each and every person can carry a single "phone" with them at all times, that can satisfy every need that can be envisaged over the course of the day. It is already easy to imagine the demise of DVDs and other media players, with files streamed off phones onto TVs. But eventually, although we are some way off it, presumably the phone could project high quality images onto projectors or blank walls, replacing televitions themselves. Will the Playstation 4, 5 or 6 be a desktop device, confined to bedrooms or living rooms, or will it be encapsulated within a pocket sized device, complete with all telecommunications, camera and other needs added on? The brightest minds in science are presumably already focussed on how to ensure vital appliances such as fridges and ovens can one day be squeezed out of the home.