John Baeyens has hope for me - now Nokia is fostering research of a mobile lifelog.

" Now Nokia is developing software to help people organise the information they capture about their lives on handsets that can shoot still or moving images, capture sounds and send text, e-mail and multimedia messages.

"The mobile telephone is becoming a life recorder," said Christian Lindholm, former head of user interfaces at Nokia and now the man behind the Lifeblog project.

Bigger memories on top-end phones means that people gradually, and inadvertently, accumulate a lot of information about themselves.

"People are gatherers," he said, "somewhere deep in the genes there's something that tells us to collect stuff."

He said Nokia had worked hard to ensure that people could do most things, such as take pictures or tap out text messages, on its handsets with one hand. "