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Is that a brick in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

By redjac ⋅ June 21, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Last weekend I ate some excellent steak. My brother, some friends and I went to Peter Luger, sitting right beneath the Williamsburg Bridge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As a result of eating this excellent steak, we stood up and felt like someone had slipped an anvil into our stomachs. So we decided to take a walk, and hey, there’s a big bridge up there you can walk across, so OK, then. Except half-way across the bridge it started raining. Deluging. Like, “Noah, why don’t you bring the car around for me” rain. So, long-short, my iPhone’s touchscreen now reacts to my touch worse than an Amish lady.

Since I already planned to jump on a 3G iPhone in about a month — because I’m an early-adopter / kool-aid-drinker — I’m using a friend’s old Nokia 6820 to hold me over for the month. You might recall two things:

1. there was a time when the Nokia 6820 was the mac-daddy cellphone
2. that time is long, long passed

There are, however, some interesting observations I have about cellphone technology based upon this forced history-lesson / nostalgia trip.

1. We Miss Battery Life
I’m writing this post on a Saturday night, I last charged the phone Wednesday night, and the battery shows only about 1/3 spent. Hell, I might make it through the weekend on this thing. That’s kinda crazy. That’s also about the only nice thing I have to say about using this old-ass phone. (Update: Dan reminded me that the flip-out QWERTY on this phone was pretty awesome, too).

2. We Needed Glasses
Remember those photos of people sitting around 60s-era TV sets watching the Lone Ranger trot across a postage-stamp-sized screen? That’s what we looked like like staring at the screens on these things… which were, with little hyperbole, the size of a large postage stamp.

3. We Were Not Very Sure of Ourselves
On my iPhone, I click the SMS icon, select a person, type a message, click send. On this phone, I click messages, select text messages, click create message, type a message, click send, find a person, confirm I want to send it to their phone, click send. Then I need to navigate out of the sent item now on my screen… which it prompts me to re-send. Why? Hell if I know. But for some reason, we felt nervous about whether or not we’d actually sent the message. Or about who we wanted to send it to. Or about whether or not we wanted to send it to their cellphone… as opposed to, what, texting their fax machine?

4. We Deserve Honorary Degrees
I think that as a generation, we deserve a hell of a lot of credit for being one giant-ass focus group for interface designers who clearly tortured ants with magnifying glasses as children. The depths you have to go to find things in the menu structure of this OS… OMFG. I feel like I should be wearing a snorkel. And I shit you not, I still haven’t figured out how to adjust the volume on a call. (Update: I found the manual online. I know now how to adjust the volume).

5. We Took Alot of Shit from Networks
There are two soft-keys on the front of this phone, and there’s an option to customize them. So since I haven’t subscribed to mobile internet on this phone, I figured having the browser as one of the soft-keys didn’t make sense. Except you can’t change the right soft-key. The network wants you to sign up for more services, and dammit, they’ll force that icon onto your desktop and you’ll like it.

6. We Were Very Proud of Ourselves
Since this is a candybar phone, I’ve set it up for key lock automagically after 1 minute. So after about 30-seconds the screen goes dark, and then 30-seconds later, the screen lights up and the phone beeps… to tell me it’s locked the keypad. Really? You want to remind me that I don’t have any use of the phone right now? That makes perfect sense. Also, whenever I get a text message, this thing beeps like the President’s calling.