This was definitely not a party I wanted to attend. After all, my neighbor Norman was throwing it. But my wife insisted we graciously accept his hospitality. “After all,” she pointed out, “he always accepts ours.”

I tried to explain that our “hospitality” consisted of Norman coming uninvited into our home to show me the latest monstrosity from his apparently one-person company, the former SoftPop Software, now called Softpopsoftwaredotcom.com.

“The company has a new name,” he said proudly as he let us in. “It’s now simply Softpop.” All of the previous names, apparently, no longer reflected a company that was making more than software, and that had survived the dot com bubble burst by carefully avoiding all success. "So, we've thought about this," he explained as I wondered just who this “we” was. "We are announcing today that we are dropping the 'computer' from our name, and we will now be known as Softpop."

There were about half a dozen other couples in the living room. With us there, Norman took center stage and did something on a laptop sitting on a nearby desk. Lights flashed as strange, squeaky viola music played in surround sound. “That’s my reality distortion field,” he explained.

He picked up a gadget that looked like a cross between a Game Boy, a pack of cigarettes, a universal remote control, and a corn beef sandwich that had spent too many days in the rain. “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. We at Softpop make products, too. This is one of them. It’s a computer, an audio and video player, a wireless communications device, and a functioning kazoo. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the yPhone.”

No one gasped.

Finger-Clickin’ Good

“The first thing you may notice about the yPhone is that it has no buttons.” He paused briefly as he looked at the 50 or so buttons that adorned the device. He turned the yPhone over in his hand, displaying the smooth backside. “By the time it’s commercially available in June of…some year, it will have no buttons. The entire interface will be based on a single, giant touch screen.”

He pressed something, and the backside lit up--it was indeed a touch screen. Norman picked up a semi-melted chocolate truffle and took a bite while people failed to respond.

“You won’t need a stylus, either. Just use your fingers.” He popped the rest of the truffle in his mouth and started typing on the screen. Then he stopped, wiped the screen, and started typing again.

“I got a great idea. I’m going to call Starbucks and order nine lattes. That will really…”

He looked at the phone, seeming uncertain. “Okay. A little trouble dialing a five without hitting two, four, six, and eight, but we’ll work on that.”

He bit his lip, then smiled. “Let me tell about the great subscription service we’re setting up for the yPhone. Rather than confuse the market by attaching our revolutionary product to any mobile phone carrier that wants it, we’ll be working exclusively with Jugular. All you need do to acquire a yPhone--aside from wait until they’re available--is buy a three-year Jugular contract for only $120 a month, and then buy the hardware for $783.39. That’s for the two-gigabyte version. For an additional $234, you can get a whopping 40 megabytes.

“Why do you need all that storage on a phone? Because the yPhone is so much more than a mobile telephone. It works with SoftPop’s revolutionary new music service, KnowTunes, offering you a chance to spend unlimited money on music you won’t actually own. By placing all of the music you own into your phone--provided that all of the music you own fits in 2GB--yPhone will give you up-until-now unheard of freedom in choosing ringtones.”

The Heart of a Phone

Norman paused for dramatic emphasis. “And let us not forget that the yPhone is, first and foremost, a phone. That’s its main job--what it was designed for.

“And what kind of phone is it? One-point-three megapixels and a digital zoom.

“But it also handles calls in a revolutionary way. If someone calls you, you push an icon on the touch screen, put the yPhone up to your face, and talk or listen. You can even talk and listen at the same time, although this may strain the battery.

“Dialing out will be a whole new experience thanks to our patent-very-pending Easy Contacts technology. You can even associate all sorts of things with each name in your phone book: a photo, a unique icon, a phone number.

“The yPhone is also Internet savvy. Thanks to its support for the Hard2Find network standard, it allows for full web browsing with the help of a magnifying glass. And you can keep your mobile phone bill down whenever you’re within range of a WiFi connection by making calls with VOIP instead of cellular technology. Or at least you could do that if Jugular hadn’t asked us to remove that capability.”

He paused and waited. When nothing happened, he asked “Any questions.”

There was a longer pause. Finally, out of embarrassment, someone asked “Why the yPhone?”

“Why not the yPhone,” Norman responded. “In fact, we feel so strongly that why not the yPhone that we intend to keep that name even when we’re sued by Cisco.”

“Do you expect to be sued by Cisco?” I asked.

“Absolutely. And as a way to actualize that conceptualization, I’ve been throwing rocks at their executive officers.”

© Copyright 2007 by Lincoln Spector