I was talking with a friend yesterday about his new phone. He’s one of these guys who always has the latest phone “just cause” and because his job has helped him form an addiction to his “crackberry”. But over the summer he gave up his blackberry for various reasons, including the fact that his then new from Japan RAZR could do some of what the blackberry could do, and do it looking cooler. I must admit, I would likely be much like him in terms of keeping up with phones had I not had other things happening that would not have gone as well had I spent $500 on phones – though after dealing with my cell carrier last night about spams and how they can’t do anything to help, I’m again in the market and am looking at unlocked GSM phones as the way to go (hmmmm….). But anyway, I digress.
His new phone is the Nokia 6822. A unit with a QWERTY keyboard and access to RIM’s Blackberry Servers. So now my friend has a phone that is the best of both worlds. I teased him about it at first, but then we got talking. He uses the phone as his communications center – being single and out of the house all the time, it works for him and many other people in a similar situation. But for me, I’m starting to settle down, so I have a place to hang my hat and stash my files, but I do travel and it is nice to be able to access “real” as in non WAP web resources as well as email – and use Bluetooth to control my computer in a presentation. So even though I would not be the same level of power user he would be, I could certainly make use of one of these higher end phones.
Moving on from there, we talked about what phones we had in the past and we both came to the conclusion that even if you take very good care of a phone, the best you can hope to get out of the thing is about 2 years, after that you are really taking your chances with battery life and general construction. Most phones will literally fall apart after a year of heavy use it seems. So there is a driver for new phones coming out all the time, another consumer item with planned obsolescence.
So as it seems to be with me, I noticed this article from Technology Review this morning about how the cell phone is becoming the remote control of our life – the uber gadget. As not to be caught off guard by this phenomena in schools, it seems that those who are looking at schools and the technology that students use should start making considerations for how to make use of these resources that will likely be coming with students within a year to university and highschool and shortly thereafter to Junior High/Middle school.
Leave a Reply