Nick Jones

I managed to survive a whole week of vacation without a laptop or internet connection, probably for the first time in a decade. It wasn’t too bad, due mainly to regular glasses of German wine and beer which dulled the withdrawal symptoms a lot.  But I’m back online now and have toggled from withdrawal to overload in a picosecond drowning in unread email, phishing scams, adverts for products I don’t want, and dubious invitations from girls named Cindy. Fortunately last week was fairly quiet without any world-changing mobile events so it looks as if I haven’t missed much. However one thing in the email torrent just caught my eye.

New Zealand to ban phone based navigation systems while driving. A couple of mobile news sites reported that NZs forthcoming ban on the use of mobiles while driving extends to handset-based navigation systems even if they are mounted in a cradle. This proposed law apparently forbids using a mobile for anything other than making or receiving a call, and only then if the handset has a car kit. But how can a handset-based system be any more distracting than a Garmin or TomTom? Especially if it uses voice navigation where you don’t need to look at the screen. I can even think of situations when a handset makes a better – and safer – navigator than a dedicated in-car GPS, e.g. because it has better live traffic news. And what does this law mean for GPSs like the Garmin Nuvi which have built-in cellular, are they banned too?

However it’s not all bad because it looks as if making VOIP calls from your laptop using WiFi or WiMax is fine while you’re driving because the law specifically talks about mobile phones, not mobile devices.

This is typical political woolly thinking born of technological ignorance. Legislating against a technology rather than a principle is almost always misguided because technology evolves faster than principles. Doing anything that distracts you while driving is bad, it doesn’t matter whether it involves a handset, a GPS, a WiMax internet tablet or your PSP.