There is something fundamentally wrong with Jakob Nielsen’s argument in his latest alertbox and I’m having trouble pinning down what it is. I agree that mobile phones are poor devices for viewing online content and that their ‘form factor’ does not lend itself to interfacing successfully to the Internet. But he goes on to suggest that the future of mobile voice communication is through hand-held devices - primarily for Internet use - which have an ear/microphone arrangement for phone calls. I’m sure that if Jakob was to do a survey of mobile phone users, the percentage of those asked would prefer to speak into a small brick-like object than through a microphone on the lapel. This is simply to do with the fact that - in my opinion - people prefer to look as if they are on the phone speaking to someone rather than walking around seeming to speak to themselves. Mobile phones are annoying enough and I certainly don’t want to see a future when everyone in the street is speaking into the ether rather than to each other.