I'm Not a Gadget Guy

Blogger's Note: OK yeah, I kinda dropped off on here for a good 2 months. What can I say, the first year of doctoral study is HELL. When I did have the free time to write, I just had no motivation to write more than 2 lines, which you know is far too little to do this blog justice. So I've got a backlog of stuff to write about... and I'm momentarily unemployed... so expect to see a lot from me in the coming days. Thanks for your patience, and enjoy!

I'm the last person in the world who would buy a Blackberry. I don't get the must-have electronic devices when they first come out. I didn't get a cell phone until I entered the wonderful world of radio station management (note: HEAVY sarcasm). It was 2003... by this time, everyone and their kid (literally) had a cell phone. I saw other people with cell phones and thought, I have no need for one. If you need me, you can call my home in the World's Smallest Apartment, if I'm not there, leave a message. Or you can e-mail me. Or IM me. See, I'm pretty reachable. But I needed to be reachable at ALL times... even though the only times I wasn't at home or the radio station I was at my 2nd job. Where my cell phone would be OFF.

But I broke down and got one, and the pattern has since repeated itself. People are buying laptops... I don't need a laptop. I can do my work at home, or at my mom's. In 2007, I bought a laptop. The latest purchase came about because I finally realized, well after much of the rest of the world, that I needed a MP3 player.

I'm philosophically against MP3 players. People start using MP3 players and they stop listening to radio. I know these things, I read articles on them, because I'm a media scholar (in case you were wondering what I've been doing for the last 2 months). But I wound up in a situation where I have a commute to work, and it doesn't involve driving. When you can drive to work, you have the car radio and you have your CDs in case a bad song comes on (which ALWAYS happens in Syracuse). In Philly, I take the train to campus. Well, most of the time I take a bus to a train... except I miss the bus half the time because it's ALWAYS EARLY, so I wind up walking to the train. Whatever, the weather's nicer these days. So I decided to rely on "old-fashioned technology" for these daily trips to campus, a portable CD player. Apparently they don't make those things like they used to, because the CDs would skip like crazy and I would bang on the thing, which is the appropriate response to any mechanical problem. However, after 4 months of skipping and banging... the CD player died. Clearly defective.

I have a pocket radio, which is nice for the bus or the walk to the train... but once on the train, it does me no good. Hence my need for a MP3 player. So I priced iPods. Those things are PRICEY! Well it just so happened that my cell phone hadn't been replaced for 2 years, which of course meant it was completely outdated. No, it wasn't actually. It did everything I wanted a cell phone to do. I want to call people and text, that's it. I had to get a camera in my last cell phone because EVERY cell phone had a camera so I had no choice. And then I thought, "Hey, I have a camera in the phone, let me take pictures." Except they were crap because I bought the cell phone with the crappiest camera because I didn't care about taking pictures. So now my requirements were simple... I need a phone that makes calls, texts, and has a MP3 player. The cell phone companies run a great racket because every 2 years (ya know, right when your contract is running out), they tell you that you need a new phone and put ridiculously huge discounts on phones to get you to "upgrade". Which really just means get locked in for another 2 years of contract.

Anyway, my Temple colleagues have smart phones. They own iPhones or Blackberries. It wasn't that long ago that you said "Blackberry" and immediately thought of high-powered business types e-mailing from their "Crackberry" or Paris Hilton leaving hers in a club bathroom somewhere. In other words, the rich and famous had them. But as with all things, eventually they become affordable to the masses. Oh, did I say "affordable"? What I meant to say was FREE. Yeah, as in my carrier told me "you need a new phone, so we'll GIVE you a Blackberry for free so we can lock you into another 2 year contract." Oh, and I had to upgrade my cell phone package so I pay $25 more a month for "data". Because this thing gets Internet. So I got a Blackberry.

Which started the process of me trying to learn this contraption. A fun process for other people to watch, I'm sure. Anyway, I set up my e-mail and everything and the thing starts making all kinds of noises because I'm getting e-mails and texts and such. My roommate (much more of a gadget guy than I and also a Blackberry owner) warns me about having to check sound levels for all possible notifications. Eventually, I got to the point where I just starting pressing buttons to see what they did. I found the camera... in so doing, I think I inadvertently took a picture of my crotch. By this point, my roommate is laughing his ass off.

Now the big thing about these smart phones is the "apps". They can make your phone do whatever you need it to do, provided you can get a signal (which of course makes it useless on the train, but I'll have my MP3s so I'm good). Well me being the radio guy I am, I wanted radio apps to pull in radio stations, including the local ones because they have yet to make a FM tuner for the Blackberry. So imagine my surprise when I was told "you need a memory card for that". I needed one for the MP3s anyway but I was hoping I could forestall the purchase and listen to radio stations. No such luck. So now I have paid for something for my "free" phone. But the apps now work so I can listen to stations from Syracuse, Cincinnati, Toronto... even Philadelphia. In Philadelphia. Isn't that amazing? And I could listen to Buffalo Sabres playoff games on my Blackberry, which was also a fun process for other people to watch and I would be walking along with friends and suddenly either pumping my fist and cheering or flipping out, depending on what was going on. Based on how the Sabres did in the playoffs this year, there was more flipping out.

I also have to deal with the occasional battery-sucking vortex. I'll explain... I've been on the road a few times recently at conventions, and wouldn't you know it, when you're in a place like a convention center or airport where they have WiFi that you have to pay for, if you choose to use your Blackberry instead, all of a sudden your battery goes from full to empty in 15 minutes. I thought there must be some sort of Blackberry battery-devouring vortex at work, but apparently it is because the thing is looking for a signal and the facility must be blocking my network so I will be forced to pay for theirs. Luckily, although I am in more airports and hotels lately, I'm not in them that much.

So it's now been about 2 months and I have to say I have become what I feared from having a Blackberry. Lazy. Let's say I'm in the living room in the old barcalounger and I want to know a sports score or check my e-mail. Now instead of walking the 20 feet to the laptop in my room, I grab the Blackberry and go to an app. Hell, sometimes when I'm in the office with my laptop SITTING RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME, I still go to the Blackberry because apparently I can't be bothered to make the 2 or 3 clicks required to get to e-mail. So yeah, I've become one of those people who can't go more than 5 minutes without checking his "Crackberry", and that's a problem... but this thing does so much stuff! It even syncs up with my MacBook so I can put my contacts on the Mac and upload music from the Mac to the Blackberry... yeah, music, for the MP3 player, the reason why I got the Blackberry. Except the music playlists glitch sometimes. The only thing glitch I've found so far, and it's the one thing that was key to my purchase. Figures.