SCIENTISTS HAVE come up with what they are ballyhooing as a working "third generation" mobile phone - an all-dancing, all-singing gadget that is supposed to revolutionize the way we live. I predict trouble, not least because its batteries have to be replaced every half-second or so.

It also needs the support of jungles of ghastly metal antenna masts that would make an Amazon rain forest look like a Saharan oasis by comparison. But I suspect that this particular cellphone's major design flaw is that it weighs 240 pounds and has to be carted about in a van.

This is the handiwork of a handset manufacturer in Sweden called Ericsson, and is its latest entry in the race to build a portable phone that provides video pictures, high-speed Internet access and, for all I know, car washing, carpet beating and sitter services for the cat.

For all the bells and whistles, the emphasis here is still on the word "portable." Maybe they have a different definition for it in Sweden, but hauling an eighth of a ton of telephone onto a bus or train, there to annoy your fellow passengers, would hardly seem to constitute "portable" in the true spirit of the word.

Ericsson's idea of "portable" currently is trundling this pile of electronics that is bigger than a whole cache of desktop computers in a little white van around a car park in the hills south of London, to see if it really works. With 240 pounds of microchips and several zillion bytes to play around with, it should not only reach the local pizza takeaway but also be able to look for NASA's missing Mars landers and perhaps zap horseflies on the planet Zog.

Frank Meehan is Ericsson's sales director, and I suspect he realizes that a 240-pound cellphone presents something of a marketing headache. But Frank is nothing if not confident about his company's boffins as Ericsson bids for billions of dollars' worth of telecom licenses: "These guys have a very good idea of how it will all work."

"Behind the scenes," he says, "everything is coming together." Meanwhile, at least he doesn't have a lot of competition just yet. Experts in the field say no working "third generation" handsets of "a more realistic size" - that is, one that won't give you an instant double hernia - have been built.

There are a few small prototypes about, but they cost about 4 million bucks apiece. And there's still the monthly phone bill to consider.

Actually, I'm not comfortable with the mobile telephone, or any sort of telephone, for that matter. In my humble opinion, the wretched device ranks - alongside the rack, IRS Form 1040 and that plastic film that sticks to everything except the stuff you want to wrap in it - as a prime candidate for history's pantheon of instruments of human torture.

The telephone, President Rutherford B. Hayes once said, "is an amazing adventure" - but then he added, "who would ever want to use one of them?" My dream is of an afterlife or an alternate universe in which people listened to him.

Instead, society has progressed (just as mobile telephones have progressed to the 240-pound level) to the "Age of Rages" - air rage, car rage and of late, phone rage. This last is the fury that explodes within callers when automatic answering systems demand that they select from seemingly endless lists of options by punching numbers on their phones instead of talking to real, live, mostly breathing people.

"If your complaint is a service one, press '1'," a disembodied voice orders. "If you wish to inquire about a bill, press '2.' If you wish to order our latest useless gizmo, press '3.' If you are bored out of your skull and have nothing better to do than press buttons, press '4'. . ." That sort of thing.

Never, of course, is there an instruction such as, "If you wish to talk to someone with a brain, ears and a tongue for speaking who can actually render a useful service, press '196'."

The result, according to a survey by the Mintel consumer analyst organization: 44 percent of phone users are irate when they are put on "hold," 36 percent blow a gasket when told they are in a queue and 29 percent detonate when they end up punching a number and getting the wrong service, department or what have you.

In Britain, these things are called "Call Centers" (except they are spelled "Centres," but that's another subject), and there's actually a Call Centre Association, with a chairman named Ewan Gowrie. If we go into a bank or post office, we can expect to stand in line there, he says, "so why not expect similar queuing mechanisms to get into a call center?"

Furthermore, Gowrie said, his association is working up a code of good practice that should improve the service. The Daily Telegraph newspaper found this idea rather interesting, if perhaps far-fetched, and set about trying to telephone the man.

It took three calls before its reporter could reach Gowrie, the newspaper said. "The first was cut off. The second required negotiating a short menu before a human voice suggested ringing another number. . ."

Maybe, as Ericsson's sales chief Frank Meehan, insists, these scientific guys know what they are doing. Somehow I doubt it, just as I doubt scientists, inventors and the like in general. Their track record isn't all that comforting.

Witness Lord Kelvin, president of Britain's prime organization of scientists, the Royal society. In 1900 he proclaimed that "X-rays are a hoax." And in 1901, Wilbur Wright told brother Orville with a fair degree of confidence that "man will not fly for 50 years."

Even old Albert Einstein got into the act by predicting in 1932 that "there is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." Einstein and I, incidentally, not only are both Pisces, but we share the same birthday - March 14. And I, too, once got wrong-footed by confidently betting it was impossible to pick 10 consecutive losers in one evening at the Sanford-Orlando dog track in Florida.

It must be something in the stars.

Thought for the Week: Lead me not into temptation - I can find the way myself.

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