I like you Berry much

Mobile phones used to be intensely personal devices, at least in that heady period between the Nokia 3310 and the iPhone. It was typical that amongst a group of four of five people each would have a different model, and trying to use someone else’s phone was like wading through wet cement. These days with the ubiquity of iPhones everybody is pretty much on a level playing field, and even the transition from an iPhone to a Galaxy (or similar) isn’t as traumatic as the transition from a Nokia to a Motorola or Sony used to be. My refusal to partake in the bleak sameness of the contemporary phone landscape is partly the reason why I continue to use my Blackberry Curve 8900, a phone that exists on a shaky plane somewhere between true smartphone and glorified address book. In reality, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the phone apart from the fact that, like all aging electronic devices, it is reaching the end of its planned obsolescence cycle. My experience with my Blackberry is akin to that of the owners of an ageing dog who will put up with its numerous shortcomings because of the wonderful times they’ve had together, and because the alternative (putting it to sleep) is too traumatic to seriously consider.

I am allegedly able to sync my Blackberry with my PC, but this feature has proved to be notoriously unreliable. When I connect my Blackberry to my computer, one of four things will happen: 1) absolutely nothing. 2) The Blackberry will indicate it is connected but the computer doesn’t recognise it. 3) The Blackberry short circuits and crashes. 4) The Blackberry connects successfully. Out of these four options, the first three are infuriatingly common, yet not quite common enough that I feel they present a real problem that needs to be addressed. Instead, I will continue to connect and disconnect my phone as calmly and carefully as a brain surgeon, convinced that my Blackberry can sense my mood and that if I get angry, it will decide to crash out of spite. If it connects successfully I pat it softly and whisper ‘well done’, if it decides to crash after all I simply sigh and wait for ten minutes while it boots up again.

Although my phone is only a couple of years old, the fact that the world is now almost exclusively tailored for iPhone and Android users means that as a Blackberry owner I’m often left out in the cold when it comes to all the benefits of our magnificent mobile age. Most of you live a wondrous existence where there are apps for just about anything you can dream of: public transport, banking, shopping, pig toppling, etc. Not me, however. If I’m lucky enough that someone actually designs an app that works on a Blackberry, I generally can’t download it because my phone will tell me that I need to update my operating system. The phone is so ancient, however, that I can’t download the update. Consequently I’m stuck in a 2008ish nightmare world where I have to rely on good old-fashioned paper timetables and baseless faith that the next tram is indeed only a few minutes away.

Internet access is also unpredictable. Occasionally I can use my phone to look up Google maps, but instead of gaining access to a movable, zoom-able map I instead get a snapshot map of the location I’m trying to get to, and (if I’m lucky) the three or four streets surrounding it.

Actual size screenshot of my primary navigation method.

This is fine if I’m already where I want to be, but as you can imagine I rarely look at a map to find a place that I’m already at. Consequently I have to use the small amount of information given to me in the snapshot and try and relate it to my current position. This surprisingly works okay when I have a rough idea of the city layout (i.e. Melbourne) but is positively useless when my surroundings are unfamiliar to me (i.e. anywhere outside a five kilometre radius of Melbourne). My phone purportedly has a ‘Maps’ feature built-in but this has the opposite problem of using Google—on Blackberry Maps I can zoom and scroll to my heart’s content but as the map data never loads I’m zooming and scrolling over an endless sea of grey. I actually find this to be quite soothing, especially when I’m hopelessly lost.

The Blackberry model that I have was designed just before touchscreens became all but ubiquitous. Consequently navigation through the various menus is served by a little trackball, which I’m sure some Blackberry engineer was paid millions of dollars (redeemable only at Blackberry App World) to come up with. It obviously seemed like a good idea at the time but now, after years of accumulating wear and gunk, the trackball is little more useful than throwing a dice to determine the outcome of where the cursor will go. Left becomes right, down becomes up, diagonal becomes ‘commit to buying’ and any direction can lead at any moment to selecting the ‘off’ button which has inexplicably been placed perilously close to the ‘settings’ icon.

For better or worse, touchscreens have meant that mobile phone use is now practically noiseless, and it’s quite possible to fire off a surreptitious text message if necessary. Living the Blackberry dream, however, means that anybody within a three hundred metre radius can hear me as I clack away at my full QWERTY keyboard which is jammed into an area half the size of my palm. My thumbs have become quite adept at pecking out the correct keys, but since the backspace key is located in a black hole relative to everything else this means it’s often more efficient for me to just accept a typing mistake and move on. Although I often like to pride myself on correct spelling and the like, in text messages it is quite common for me to use words like ‘tobight’, ‘weelk’ and ‘caruj’. I haven’t bothered to check with my friends to see if this annoys them, and frankly I don’t cafrs.

I realise the above sounds a lot like I’ve been forced, by some techno-draconian master, to use the Blackberry against my will. Not so—the truly astonishing thing is that despite the above I still have a fierce loyalty for my phone. One thing I like about it is its lack of moving parts; my previous phone was a Nokia monstrosity with a sliding screen that granted you access to the keyboard. It felt at any moment that the whole thing would disintegrate in my hands, whereas the Blackberry is so sturdy it feels like I’m commandeering an oil tanker. It also means that I’m much less scared of dropping my phone, and when I do, it simply bounces a couple of times and leaves a small dent in the ground. Unlike iPhone users, you will never see a Blackberry owner stubbornly continuing to use their phone despite a horrifically cracked screen.

The sad thing is, in today’s age of disposable plates and fleeting personal relationships, your mobile phone is the one thing that tends to stay with you, wherever you go, at least for a couple of years. It’s the 21^st century’s answer to the security blanket. I know that when the time comes to remove my sim card for the last time, I will say a little word of thanks to my tireless Blackberry, before being quickly seduced by a younger, sexier phone.

Goody Bag Vol. III

Welcome to the third edition of the Goody Bag, a collection of miscellaneous musings and likeable links. These are thoughts that aren’t really meaty enough to turn into a full post, but are still worth mentioning anyway. Maybe you'll learn something, maybe you won't; the nature of the Goody Bag is inherently mysterious! 

The internet is old (and so are you)

I noticed the other day that eBay's copyright tagline reads “(C) 1995-2013” – making it eighteen years old. That just seems bizarre, right? In Australia, eBay becomes a fully-fledged adult this year, able to buy its own alcohol and vote in elections (I’m sure it would keep to the right of the political spectrum, free markets and all that). It also means that next year there will be people of a legal age that have never lived in a world without eBay. By comparison, it won’t be until 2022 that Facebook turns 18 and becomes mature, although some may argue that it probably never will.

History of domain names

Here’s a bizarre fact to mildly impress your friends. Before gmail.com was the domain of the ubiquitous mail program we all know and love, it belonged to Garfield.com, who used it as a site where you could sign up for a Garfield themed newsletter. I tried to find the history of other well-known domain names, such as facebook.com and google.com, but it’s actually quite difficult to find out without paying through the nose for a service that will give you access to the histories. It’s worth remembering how valuable domain names are, and if you’re the owner of one that some gigantic company happens to want (the previous owner of fb.com, for example) it can make you very rich. It’s the 21^st century equivalent to discovering your property has vast amounts of oil reserves (although, you know, in the 21^st century it’s still quite profitable to discover that you’re sitting on massive oil reserves).

The success rate of search engines

When’s the last time a search engine failed to return something that you wanted? I bet it doesn’t happen all that often – provided that the thing you want actually exists and you have at least a vague idea of some keywords that might help you out. The other day I spent far longer than I should have searching for an obscure kids’ album that I used to listen to. All I knew was that the album was about dinosaurs and a couple of the track names. Granted it did take a little while, but I eventually located it: ‘The Dinosaur Album’ by Glynn Nicholas and the Funky Fossils. During the course of my search I also learned that the titular Glynn Nicholas once co-wrote a television show with Australian comedy stalwart Shaun Micallef. If Nicholas and Micallef got together and performed a live recording of the album, I would be able to die a happy nerd.

The digital neighbourhood

Despite the fact the internet has vast amounts of content (one estimate puts the amount of active websites at over half a billion) I often find myself visiting the same handful of sites for the majority of my browsing. It’s interesting that despite the amount available at my fingertips, just like in the real world I have a ‘neighbourhood’ that I frequent regularly. These sites include my online banking, email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, a couple of forums and one or two sites with articles and other content. Aside from these, I do make trips ‘outside’ the neighbourhood when required, but generally only if I actually want something – it’s rare that I’ll wander away just on a whim.

Map of the internet

And speaking of wandering and neighbourhoods and the size of the internet, here is a really cool site that provides a visual representation of the internet. It’s interactive, meaning you can zoom in on certain parts and see the connections between the various sites (the site uses the same engine as Google Maps). What I really like about this is how quickly it gives you an impression of the major players of the internet (guess who), and also a nice colour-coded representation of the geological location of the sites (USA is blue, India green, China yellow etc). I wonder if it is just a coincidence, or a conscious design choice, that the map appears to look very much like most conceptions of the universe itself. I don’t understand enough about maths or physics to know the answer; however the website does give some analogies which draws on terms like ‘electrified bodies’ and ‘gravitational quantum’ to make it all seem very impressive.

And last, but most infuriatingly

The Steve Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher is due out later this year, and is already a frontrunner for the ‘Worst Film Title of the Year’ award. It’s called ‘jOBS’, and before you go and check IMDB, that is not a typo. It doesn't even make sense, apart from the fact that a lower case 'j' kind of looks like a lower case 'i', what with the little dot and all. But, because they're going for the whole 'iPod, iTunes' thing, shouldn't it really be spelt jObs? The title is an infuriating combination of laziness and marketing bullshit; obviously you can’t call a film just ‘Jobs’ (unless you’re making a Marxist propaganda film) but the film producers obviously couldn’t come up with anything snappier so they decided to go with the wAcky sPelling instead. A good movie title should be like a good haircut – at first eye catching and attractive, suitable for the person or film it adorns, yet it should be natural enough that after a while you stop thinking about it and it just becomes part of the whole – not something you’re still noticing two hours later, wondering ‘who the hell thought that was a good idea?’

That’s it for now. Turn your computer off and go for a walk.