It’d mean I could walk between buildings and blog as I go, not in a crappy wi-fi enabled kind of way (although, admittedly, if SACS coverage extended to the vicinity surrounding the school, I’d probably have bought a wireless card by now and had a hack at making it work), but in a fluent, hands-free, talk-into-phone-and-content-appears-online kind of way.

How cool would that be?!  Never again would there be a complaint of “you haven’t updated your blog since last time I checked a few hours ago!”, because not an hour would pass without a phonecall and a voice-enabled update of the website!!

Well, okay.  An hour would pass.  In fact, many hours would pass.  But it’s a cool idea, don’t you think?  Still, several phone calls a day (let’s throw three in the air as a ballpark figure, not counting at-home updates) would add up.  Let’s do the maths, shall we?  Okay.  So, let’s say an Orange phone serverside, so I get free five minute phone calls from my baby Samsung.  Let’s make it prepaid — not as though we’re making calls from it.

A chargeable call must be made within a 12 month period, or the service will get narfed.  Okay.  That’s cool, I can setup an SMS gateway online and use that occasionally.  Bonus.  Cost?  Assuming I keep the calls under 5mins, nothing to connect — there’s a limit on the amount of free Orange-to-Orange time I can have a month, but it’s pretty ridiculously high, so I’d not worry about that too much — and the cost for the prepaid?  Well, between $33 and $90, depending on the expiry length required.  So if I go for $90, that gives me a year to use the credit.

At what rate?  $0.18/message sent, and of course, recieving calls is free.

So let’s say about $50 a year, plus initial handset cost.  Let’s face it, I’m not really one for bothering to login to a web interface to send messages most of the time — I’d use it, but not incredibly often.

All this is of course ignoring the technical feasibility of using telephony as a voice-recognition medium — not only do current systems struggle with microphones already, this is also without the other conditions imposed on mobile lines!  The software side of things (i.e. interfacing with web panel/directly with MySQL) also presents a little bit of a challenge, although not prohibitive — it’d be a bit of fun, to say the least.

This’d make me blog more, though.  A lot more.  That said, I blog more when procrastinating, or when holidays are on — the simple solution?  Give me more holidays (or assessments:|)!!!

Overcomplication of a simple problem rocks.