Imagine a device on your phone that could tell you how high you’d just jumped, how fast you’d descended and even whether that last trick you did was an underflip or a backside rodeo. Weird? Yes. Pointless? Quite possibly. But this appears to be the goal of the new Nokia ‘Push’ project, which they’re developing in collaboration with Burton Snowboards. Well, all that and generating some ‘cool’ publicity amongst the key youth demographic. The Push project is, from what we can make out, an open source idea whereby developers (they call them ‘hackers’ cos it sounds cooler) can devise real-life applications for their new N900 handset. In 2009 they began with skateboarding, attaching a chipboard device beneath the trucks (like some futuristic 80’s riser pad) which keeps track of the board’s rotations in every direction and logs the tricks performed. The idea is that you could make real life into a kind of computer game – perhaps playing a game of SKATE against someone in Brazil, same as you’d play them at Tour of Duty on your Xbox? Unfortunately, it does somewhat skip over the obvious question of ‘why would you WANT to turn real life into a computer game?’ Maybe we’re getting old and the future is all gonna be about augmented reality and ‘kaping’, but we’re yet to be convinced. What’s wrong with ditching technology and getting back to nature once in a while?