In an era when smartphones boast extraordinary capabilities and price tags to match, it’s striking how insignificant they’ve become as gadgets in modern James Bond movies. The Ericsson JB988 from Tomorrow Never Dies remains, in my mind, as the definitive Bond phone that doubled as a shock weapon, featured biometric scanning, and, most memorably, allowed Bond to remotely drive his BMW 750iL.
By contrast, recent movies have relegated phones to background props such as burner devices, ominous text messages (“ELLIPSIS”), and the occasional tense call. For a Q Branch built on ingenious gadgets, today’s hyper-advanced phones are ripe to be more innovative and even practical gadgets.
I think it’s time future Bond movies treat mobile technology not only as communication and GPS devices, but once again as a centerpiece of Bond’s gadget arsenal. This sentiment is moot of course if the next movie is a reboot period piece, but if it’s a modern setting, the possibilities are endless and the limits of a cell phone as a gadget should be robustly explored.
