MOBILE penetration in Australia climbed to 120 per cent last year, boosted by phones specially designed for children and the elderly. Your mobi is with you from dawn to dusk, could you live without?

I grew up in a world without mobile phones: now it seems impossible to imagine life without one in my pocket.

My alarm clock goes off at 05:45. Except it’s not a clock, it’s my phone. Because I have it in my hand, I quickly check my email. Before I am out of bed, I am working. I pull on some clothes and take my dogs for a quick walk. On route I check out www.cairns.com.au and half a dozen newspaper websites around the world, browse my Twitter feed and see what family and friends are up to on Facebook: all on my mobile.

For nine months of the year a weather check is pretty irrelevant here, but each morning I scan the remarkably accurate Yahoo! six day forecasts for a dozen cities I’ve lived in or care about: on my mobile.

Back home I eat breakfast while scanning papers from Cairo to Caracas via the Newseum’s terrific Today’s Front Pages, or listen to live radio from the BBC, ABC or NPR: all on my mobile. 

I use my phone hundreds of times each day. I check my email frequently, search Google, make calculations and record interviews. I update far too many social networks, watch www.mcfc.co.uk and speak to my nearest & dearest via Skype and Viber.

Because it can talk to the US Department of Defense’s Global Positioning System my phone is one of the most powerful navigational tools ever invented, able to chart my exact position to within a few metres. I employ its GPS to geotag my location every time I take a photograph. When I go for a run my Nike+ GPS charts my exact route and time. Whenever I need to get somewhere I’ve never been before, I fire up Google Maps, punch in my destination and my mobile directs me.

I cook dinner and make cocktails with recipes stored on my handset, shop from the palm of my hand, and wind down in bed with the Economist’s app (the print edition arrives a week after publication and thus goes straight into my archive).

How did I ever live without a mobile? Weirdly, for nineteen years, very happily.

I looked up things in books, navigated with paper maps and made arrangements I stuck to without last minute changes.  

Several years ago I accidentally dropped my mobile down the toilet: the last time I tried to text and pee at the same time. For 24 hours this was weirdly liberating, after that a nightmare. I didn’t know how to contact anyone, didn’t know what anyone else was up to, didn’t know how to cope with being cut off in every way imaginable. I’d forgotten how to live without a mobile.

What the mobile phone giveth it has also taken away: we can talk to anyone, anywhere, ergo the concept of escape from the grid becomes harder every day. 

Is this a price worth paying for holding the font of all knowledge in our hands? The unprecedented interactions our mobile phones provide are why we love them so: we are thrilled by the feeling that we are living in the future. Certainly our great grandparents’ minds would boggle.

What’s next? Soon 4G will replace 3G, video calls will become the norm; eventually handsets may disappear, and we’ll be wired into the grid. Impossible?  The first mobile phone call ever made in Australia rang in 1987. Things change fast!   

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