I was listening to a piece on the radio about using voice pattern recognition to access bank accounts etc. All you do is speak your account number, and the system recognizes it’s you speaking.

It struck me this would be easily fooled by recording someone doing the log in and playing it back down the phone… and that dredged something up from the past.

Many moons ago, I had a Psion 3, one of those early PDAs that looked a bit like a pocket-sized laptop. One of the clever little tricks it would do was sing a phone number. You held it against your phone and it dialled for you by generating the dial tones from its speaker.

I now have several devices from my desktop PC to an iPaq PDA that have lists of phone numbers on. All of them can generate sounds – but none of the software has tone dialling built in. So I have to manually type the number into the phone.

I suspect it’s just too low tech for the whizzy designers who mutter ‘Bluetooth’ and ‘Smartphones’. Rubbish. It’s no help when I want to use my solid old fashioned office desk phone. Or a phone box. Or even my ancient pre-Bluetooth mobile.

Every design team should have a luddite, the electronic equivalent of Top Gear’s James May, whose job it is to say ‘yes, that’s all very wonderful, but why not just add this. It’s not hi-tech, it’s simple stuff. But it’s useful.’