Berry-picking

My father in law, as a wedding present, gave Elle and I a pair of Blackberries.  That was a pretty cool wedding present.

Among the many thing sthat are strange and new about being a Blackberry-er (Blackberrier?  Blackberrer?) is that the calling/message/features plan actually costs less that the plan cost for my previous phone, which was formerly owned by Abraham Lincoln, in his pre-President years.  As one might expect of a phone that old, the picture quality was not stellar, and the reception was sometimes spotty, but overall I thought it was a pretty solid, reliable phone.  Now, I can’t believe I was paying so damn much for a wireless paperweight.

This Blackberry has so many bells and whistles.  If I learned one new trick every day, I think I’d die at a ripe old age and still not fully understand the full potential of my device.  It has GPS, and it puts the apostrophes into ‘isn’t’ and ‘I’m’ without me having to type them, and it translates into half a dozen languages, and it has Su Doku with four levels of difficulty, even.  My mind is boggled.  I could sit on the couch and just doodle with my Blackberry for three days straight, barely pausing to eat or check Facebook – and I can even do that on the Blackberry.  (Not eat, the Facebook thing – though who knows, maybe there’s a grilled-cheese app too that I just haven’t found yet.)

Here’s the things I don’t like about my new device:

1)  It has so much to do, I find myself doing that instead of other stuff.  I could be reading ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and instead I’m playing Word Mole.

2)  It has so many powers and abilities, it scares me.  It gives me an inferiority complex.  I mean, I can throw a ball farther, but Blackberry can identify a song if I hold it next to a radio.  I mean, I can do that if I already know the song, but …you know, it’s like magic.

3)  The keys are a bit small.  I was totally going to road-test the online application, and actually blog from the Blackberry, for the sheer coolness and look-at-this-ness of it.  But I haven’t mastered the art of skillful typing with my fat sausage fingers yet, so if I’d tried that, it would have taken five hours and it would have lopoked likwe thgjisd.  (On the upside, most of my contractions would have been auto-apostrophized.)

4)  It’s not waterproof, at all.  Not that I was planning to check my email while scuba diving, or download music in the shower, but wouldn’t it be great to know you could?

5)  Everyone seems to have one of these things, so if I misplace it, I have to pick up every Blackerry in the room (which can be literally dozens) to see which one’s mine.  I need a cool skin for it.

But here are some perks!

a)  I never have to be bored again – or not until my battery dies, anyway.

b)  Never lost either, unless I get turned-around in some underground catacomb where my signal dies and I can’t GPS my way to a mining outpost or something – but what are the odds of that?  (Watch this exact scenario befall me tomorrow)

c)  It takes awesome pictures.  If I also took awesome pictures, that would be awesome.  But the Blackberry does the best it can with what I give it.

d)  Three words:  Goodbye Predictive Text.

e)  Elle has the same phone, same model, so we match very charmingly.  Plus on the rare occasion we lose a signal while on a call with each other, we can no longer blame my piece of crap Abe Lincoln phone.

f)  I’m getting way better at Su Doku.

g)  I’m a better, quicker correspondent with people.

h)  It just looks cooler than an old flip-phone with the enamel chipped off and a cloudy display screen.

All in all, there seem to be more ups than downs to being a Blackberrite, and I’m heartily grateful to my father-in-law (how cool that I have one of those).  It’ll just take practice, and patience with myself, and a bit of creativity, to really use it like a tool instead of a cell phone with extra games on it.

Wonder if it needs a name.

~ by joshkauffman on July 23, 2009.