I guess we are coming to the end of the early iPhone era. But Coupland, the author of Microserfs and Generation X, moves onto another, more disturbing theory: that gadgets make morons of us all.

I remember in the 80s when cellphones first started to pop. I remember how, if you saw someone using a cellphone on a street, you immediately thought they were an asshole: gee, my phone call is so important I have to make it right here and right now! Twenty years later, we're all assholes. We're assholes at the supermarket's meat counter at 5:30pm, phoning home to ask if we need prosciutto; we're assholes driving in traffic; and we're assholes wandering down the streets. And with cellphones and handhelds, we collapse time and space and our perception of distance and intimacy.

He says:

I want a treadmill that presents on screen a reality game that interacts with your exercise: an adventure in which you chase villains, rescue damsels or solve puzzles - this is where technology should be headed so far as humdrum chores are concerned. Come on, you eccentric British software geniuses and game designers. Help me to a brilliant white smile and slim fitness the fun way.

YES! Someone make a Running Hero game for Xbox 360 right now, complete with $300 treadmill attachment. We'd totally buy that if we could simulate running on screen, as opposed to the treadmill workout we do now where we just stare into the nearby lake and wished we were drowning instead. [Stephen Fry]

Besides just having as deep a knowledge of smartphones as most gadget bloggers we've seen, he also offers many, many, many insights only a comedian of his caliber can. These choice quotes were picked by Wired and BB Gadgets:

We know what an insult to the human spirit were some of the monstrosities constructed in past decades. An office with strip lighting, drab carpets, vile partitions and dull furniture and fittings is unacceptable these days, as much perhaps because of the poor productivity it engenders as the assault on dignity it represents.

Well, computers and SmartPhones are no less environments: to say "well my WinMob device does all that your iPhone can do" is like saying my Barratt home has got the same number of bedrooms as your Georgian watermill, it's got a kitchen too, and a bathroom."

Sony Ericsson M600i: "Just how dumb are the software engineers, designers and marketeers at Sony E? [It's] the clumsiest, most asinine method of internet connection ever devised.

We spend our lives inside the virtual environment of digital platforms - why should a faceless, graceless, styleless nerd or a greedy hog of a corporate twat deny us simplicity, beauty, grace, fun, sexiness, delight, imagination and creative energy in our digital lives?

And one of our favorites, about Windows Mobile:

Let's look at the WinMob now. The HTC Touch is called (by idiots) an iPhone killer because it comes without a keyboard and makes a brief and rather feeble nod towards the idea of a strokeably operated touch-screen offering a silly cube transformation effect with big buttons. Oh, and the Touch is WinMob 6 rather than 5 (you won't notice the difference - a quite cool coloured line fribble in the agenda which shows you which days of the week are busy is the best addition, otherwise it's virtually indistinguishable from WM5).

If you're reading this Stephen—and based on how much you keep up with gadgets, we bet you are—we hope to see many more posts from you like this in the future.

[Stephen Fry via Wired via Boing Boing Gadgets]