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Yes! - a mobile phone that's just a phone, please?

Is my phone mine? or does it actually belong to the network? If it is mine, why does it do so many things that I don't want it to do, but the network does?

I hate to find myself enthusiastically agreeing with that well-known comedian, Jeremy Clarkson - but his recent column calling for "a mobile I can actually work" echoes, almost to the word, a conversation I had two weeks ago with Nokia's chief phone strategy director, at the launch of the new N-Gage package.

I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the Finn concerned thought I was a quaint old fogey. I maybe! - but I'm not alone. To quote the petrol-icon:

What I want is a mobile phone with a battery that lasts for more than six seconds. This means no colour screen. A colour screen uses more electricity than the Pentagon. I do not want it to take photographs. I do not want it to play music. I do not want to receive e-mails. I want it to be a telephone.

No such device is offered. Can you believe that? Seriously. Not one single mobile phone company in this vast and glorious world is offering a phone that is just that. A phone. A device that enables you to speak with someone a long way away.

Mr Clarkson (I can reveal) is very near my age, which probably explains why he left out the quite important feature of sending texts. We "elderly" folk are not thumb-conscious, it is well known. But otherwise, he's spot on: what most people over the age of 40 want is the Nokia 6310i.

You can, as it happens, still buy this classic design from Expansys for a trivial £100.95 including tax. But stocks are low, and no new ones are being built - and of course, there's the real problem that the technology in the phone could really do with a swift revamp.

For today's mobiles, a battery the size and weight of the one in the 6310i would be enough to drive the thing without a recharge for pretty nearly two weeks. So why not stick a modern phone circuit into the old box? And maybe, give it a higher-contrast display - or even, a bigger one!

And if it offends the designers just to tart up an old classic and they feel they really must add something new and shiny (to ruin it like the VW Beetle was or the Mini Cooper was, but there) then a USB link to the PC instead of the daft proprietary sockets Nokia goes in for would fit with current thinking. A modern Bluetooth radio wouldn't change anything except ease of use.

Update the synch capabilities to make it possible to edit the phone book on a PC or a Mac and update the software so that it works as a proper modem and sell it as a phone.

The world will be full of people who want "just this" or "just that" on top. There are, I suggest, thousands of other phones which include those extra features; what this 6301i did, to perfection, was make and receive calls. I've had mine for five years, and it fits in my hand, and makes and receives calls.

The text feature is, perhaps the thin end of the wedge. It allows people to say: "But these days, I do all my texting on Instant Messenger!" or "I'd be lost without my email phone..." and so they probably do. But the sort of person who is still using the 6301i is the sort of person who really isn't interested in those features, and is never going to be. To quote the wag of Top Gear again:

My wife suggested I buy a RaspBerry, but I dislike these phones with the passion I normally reserve for ramblers and John Prescott. This is because people who have RaspBerries do nothing all day but fiddle with them. Since my wife got hers all she has said to anyone is "Mmm?"

It's not just me and Jeremy, you know. I've lost count of the number of people who find modern phones too small to operate, too light for the user to know which pocket it's in, and too feeble to make an hour-long call and still punch a signal into the network.

Last time Sony Ericsson introduced a whole range of phones, I was delighted to find that they had a category they called talk and text. I leapt through the crowds at the expensive Belgravia hotel they used for the launch, elbowing gorgeous gurly publicity bunnies aside - and discovered that they are all teeny phones, with cameras, and a battery life which is no more than you'd expect from something that light weight.

So, if there is a widespread demand for such a simple phone, why doesn't Nokia or Sony Ericsson make one?

Sadly, it's because the customers Nokia and Sony Ericsson talk to are not you and me; they sell to the networks.

Networks want extra features which might, conceivably, produce extra revenue. Ringtones made extra revenue. Perhaps MP3s will make extra revenue, or maybe MMS will? The networks say: "Stick the features in!"

Please don't.

Mr Clarkson's rant is on Times Online - and you might imagine that you don't need to click on this in order to find it. You would be wrong. If you go to www.timesonline.com and enter "mobile" into their search box, you will get :

Search results: 'mobile' (0 results).