Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Last weekend, as a result of a little incident with an exploding washing machine A.M.'s old cell phone got wrecked. That led us to taking an emergency mission to the Verizon store (she's a hall director, which means that if she isn't constantly available people start freaking out).
While we were there looking at potential candidates for a new phone for her a Blackberry Curve, quietly minding its own business caught my eye. I guess I like shiny things with lots of buttons.
As I was playing with it, it also caught A.M.'s eye. So we decided to ask the sales-dude about it. And found out that not only was it awesome, as the result of A.M.'s job at a university we could get it cheap and get a cheap internet/e-mail plan. Further, we discovered that low-and-behold we both were eligible to upgrade our phones. So before better sense could quash the impulsive urge to buy a new gadget, we both got ourselves shiny new Blackberries (A.M.'s is pink while mine is a manly-super-macho silver and black).
Now that I've had this contraption for a week now, I can't believe that I was able to survive without the constant ability to check e-mail, surf the net, and various sundry awesomely cool fun things that the Blackberry allows me to do. It was like when the cave-dude (or if you think that the Earth is only 6000 years old, Adam) discovered fire. Now that I have a Blackberry Curve, I no longer have to eat my woolly mammoth raw!
With the Curve, I can check my e-mail from any of my numerous e-mail accounts at any time I want, I (after the addition of a sweet, sweet 4 GB microSD card) can store a butt-load of music, movies, pictures, PDFs, and pretty much anything else to keep me amused, and can take surprisingly good pictures with the 2 megapixel camera on the back of it.
Also with the full qwerty keyboard, text messages and e-mails are a breeze to send with the Blackberry. I'm seriously in love with this gadget. Also, the thing is damn near indestructible with my butter fingers, I've dropped it at least a dozen times in the last 4 days and it works perfectly (though I did think ahead and buy a hard plastic case to put it in, that's probably what has allowed it to survive a week of me using it).
Finally, I've found that the Blackberry is actually a pretty sweet phone on top of being a great e-mail/text message/PDA gadgety thing. It gets far superior reception than my old Motorola and has a far better pick-up and speaker so people get to hear my voice in all its glory without static and line noise. All-in-all my Blackberry curve is perhaps the best gadget I've ever purchased (yes, I think it might be even better than my iBook, which is a pretty sweet gadget).
Now I know there are some folks out there who are all, "Why did you get a Blackberry rather than an iPhone, especially given that you're a super-duper Mac-o-phile?" To that I have a two-part answer. One, the Blackberry is made by Research in Motion, a Canadian company. And, I am proud to support the Canadian tech industry. Two, the iPhone has a stupid touchscreen that really doesn't accommodate my fat clumsy ex-rugby player fingers particularly well. Every single time I've tried an iPhone out, it takes me a good five minutes just to get the thing I want opened open.
The Blackberry actually has keys, which are raised and far enough apart that I can actually hit just the keys I want, even when I'm thumb typing. Even when I'm one handed thumb typing. Seriously, I love my Blackberry so much that A.M. should be a little jealous of it.
