从不使用的手机功能:电话

Cambridge, Mass. -- Harvard University senior Drew Robb is so attached to his cellphone that he keeps it by his bedside at night and in his front jeans pocket every day. He uses the Apple iPhone to check email, text his friends and play games, pretty much for everything -- except phone calls.

Calling 'really slows you down,' says the 22-year-old physics and math major from Honolulu.

The way Mr. Robb and his friends use their phones offers a glimpse of where consumer technology is heading. Their phones are used non-stop for their social lives and their group project to design a mobile guidebook to Cambridge. The friends also show how quickly change is happening: When Mr. Robb's friend Winston Yan, a 21-year-old physics major from Alexandria, Va., arrived as a freshman in 2006, he had a phone that couldn't send or receive email.

Interest in smart phones has attracted a new universe of students to computer science classes, says David Malan, a computer science lecturer who teaches Computer Science 50, the introductory class at Harvard. Mr. Malan gave his students a number of options they could focus on for their final projects, including writing traditional computer software and Web-based applications. Many chose to make cellphone apps. It has become easier for students to create Web and mobile applications thanks to the proliferation of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, which help developers share data and content. And ever since Mark Zuckerberg famously launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room, computer science -- and dreams of it -- have grown here. All this helped rebuild enrollments which had fallen after the dot-com bubble burst. The current semester-long introductory course has 337 students, compared to 283 in 2007 and 132 in 2006.

Mr. Robb and four classmates have been developing an iPhone application called Rover, named because cellphones rove. Most nights, the friends are in a small office near campus where a pyramid of empty Diet Coke cans sits in the corner. They huddle around laptops and desktop computers, often writing code until 7 a.m.

Rover began when seniors Alexander Bick and Winston Yan decided to make a mobile application for a guidebook to Cambridge restaurants and services. Mr. Bick built the initial application for his final project in Computer Science 50.

'The Unofficial Guide to Life at Harvard' had been published by the Harvard Student Agencies since the 1970s, but students didn't want to carry a book when they wanted to find out where to get Chinese food, Mr. Yan says.

Last year, Mr. Yan and Mr. Bick released their first version of their iPhone application. The free guidebook has been downloaded about 2,500 times. Users can read about 900 different restaurants, cafes and other businesses in Cambridge and find deals offered by local merchants.

They won a $10,000 prize from an AT&T-sponsored competition and $2,500 from a Harvard competition. The Harvard Student Agencies, a student-run, non-profit that helped sponsor the Harvard competition, continues to provide aid and funding to the Rover group. Last summer, the team added Joy Ding, Cameron Spickert and Mr. Robb to work on improving the application and new projects.

They all had been programming for years. Mr. Spickert, a 22-year-old computer-science major who grew up in Golden, Colo., began creating Web sites in fourth grade. Ms. Ding, 21, a computer-science major from Del Mar, Calif., created her first Web site in seventh grade. It was a blog 'with garish colors' where she wrote and posted pictures of herself and her friends, she says. 'Over-sharing was the thing to do, even before there was Facebook.' Mr. Bick, 21, an engineering sciences major from Short Hills, N.J., made his first Web site in sixth grade so people could order the plants his Boy Scout troop was selling.

Today's twentysomethings 'grew up interacting with people in a certain way, by typing things and sharing photos. And that's what they are comfortable with,' says Drew Bamford, director of user experience at HTC Corp., a cellphone manufacturer. Mr. Bamford works at HTC's 'innovation office' which studies usage of cellphone features and applications that go far beyond voice calling. 'One-on-one interaction may not be as relevant for this generation,' he says.

The Harvard friends' days begin by reaching for their phones to scan email as soon as they wake up. Mr. Bick spends about half an hour before classes answering emails and scanning headlines on Google News on his Lenovo ThinkPad x200 Tablet PC.

During class, he uses the tablet to take notes and to record lectures so he doesn't have to type everything the professor says. That frees him up to check email during class and send instant messages to friends in class, often asking questions about the lecture, or just chatting. In engineering classes, he uses a stylus to draw diagrams directly on his laptop screen.

'I record the audio of the lecture, which feeds my bad habit of checking email,' Mr. Bick says. During the afternoons, Mr. Bick and the others spend a lot of time catching up on email, reading blogs and chatting with friends over instant messaging.

Mr. Yan spent about $3,000 on electronics in 2009, including computer monitors, keyboards, a digital camera and a television that he shares with his roommates in his dorm. Still, when they do want to watch TV, they'll catch '30 Rock ' or 'The Daily Show' on Web sites YouTube or Hulu.

'There is an expectation that people have instant access to email,' Mr. Yan says. 'You expect replies from people pretty quickly.'

The friends hardly call each other. 'People resist protocols that call for verbal communication,' Mr. Robb says. Translation: People don't like using their phones to make calls or listen to voice mails.

Phone calls are usually reserved for friends and family who don't live in the Boston area. Ms. Ding frequently talks with her long-distance boyfriend on the phone or video chats with him using Skype. She also has a few friends who don't text message. One recent Friday night, she and some friends were meeting up to go to a school basketball game. Ms. Ding had to remember to call her friends -- and not text them -- to set up a time and place to meet for the game.

The Rover team is currently working on adapting their Harvard guidebook application for other guidebook publishers. In the next several weeks, the team plans to launch applications for Moon travel guides published by Avalon Travel. They are releasing apps for Moon's guide on Cabo San Lucas and Baja California, the Yucatan and Puerto Vallarta.