Hong Kong has long been one of my favourite cities in the world, and it’s been terrific to be up here for the past week working with the Catalist Group and meeting prospective investors and customers. On the mobile front, however, I’m temporarily experiencing life as a “Normob”: or to clarify, as a normal mobile user.

I first became aware of Normobs via Chris Kettle and some other friends who attended a mobile event in the UK where the term was bandied about. But this week I’ve experienced life first hand as one, and I’m reeling from confusion.

Unlike some countries – Australia and Singapore, for example, Hong Kong doesn’t have major identity requirements in order to provision prepaid mobile access; it’s primarily walk into a store, pay HK$100 (around A$15) and walk out with an activated SIM card. Text and voice work fine, and the rates aren’t bad either – HK$0.10 per minute for local calls (around 1.5c) which has enabled me to call into our VoIP service just fine. But mobile data? Forget it.

(This is despite the HKCSL prepaid packaging advertising mobile broadband as one of the benefits of the prepaid service – an anomaly which was confirmed to me by one of the retail assistants, who just shrugged when I pointed to the packaging with a “but it says here that…..”).

So here I am, with…..voice. And text.  Only. Like it’s, I don’t know, 2002 or something.

I can’t hit the Google search portal, or mobile Facebook. Or use Google Maps, or Gmail. Most of the Symbian apps on my E51 are utterly useless sans data access and I’ve found myself with spare time on the MTR wishing my handset would do something. Anything. But it’s now just a mobile phone.

And I’m, temporarily at least, a “Normob”.