God himself could not sink this phone

So my Nexus 4 arrived and it’s beautiful. The screen is amazingly clear, and Android 4.3 is superfast. In terms of performance, updating from my Blackberry to this is like going from a shopping trolley to a fighter jet.

Speaking of Blackberry, take a look at this graph from the Wall Street Journal:

Sourced from http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/09/20/blackberrys-slump-in-4-charts/?mod=e2tw

So while all the Cal Hockleys of the smartphone world were paying people lots of money to take them to safety on an iPhone, I clung to my Blackberry and listened to the band as we slowly went down. Thankfully I was resourceful enough to find a boiler door (i.e. my Nexus) and everything worked out okay (except for that person who I was clinging to it with, who may or may not have been my true love and is now decomposing at the bottom of the ocean ... ).

Is it weird that I find Blackberry’s demise sad? I guess I had a vested interest in the company because I had my Curve for so long. I still think it was a good phone too, but age (and my parent’s toilet) got the better of it. Now Blackberry are kind of like that best friend you used to hang around with in Grade Four but haven’t spoken to for a while, and for me it’s as if I’ve just found out they have a terminal disease. What do I do? Wish them luck I suppose, and hope they don’t me ask for money.

So now I’m doing that thing where I’m finding any excuse to use my phone. Someone casually asks what time it is in London? LMGTFY. I’ve also sent a fair few messages that have low or zero relevance except that they’ve been an excuse for me to play around with the (very fun) Android swipe typing feature. If you know me, you probably suspect that you’ve gotten one of these messages in the last couple of days, but then again it’s probably hard to distinguish them from all the other unneccessary shit I send.

I admit the novelty of the new phone is slowly wearing off. Which is a good thing, because I’m still not quite sure how I feel about being so attached to it. But since I can actually talk to my phone and have it understand me I’m leaning towards classifying it as a sentient being and therefore a friend rather than an object. I’d be tempted to go so far as to claim it as a co-dependant relationship but it’s quite clear I need my Nexus much more than it needs me.

Yes I’m scared of becoming a Google fanboy; no I don’t want to talk about it

Two days ago I took the plunge and ordered a Google Nexus 4. If you know about the history of me and my Blackberry, or my penchant for keeping things until they are absolutely, embarrassingly unusable, then you’ll understand this is kind of a big deal.

Basically, my Blackberry is still ‘usable’ in the most literal sense of the word, but ever since I dropped it in my parent’s toilet (unsoiled, thankfully) using it has been even more of a labour of love than usual. Added to my general Blackberry woes of low (i.e. non-existent) compatibility and infinite loading screens was a trackball which steadfastly refused to do what I wanted it to. This is fine if you don’t use the trackball often, but back here in tactile user interface land you must understand that the trackball is the essence of the Blackberry Curve.

My trackball kind of works okay for the most part, but it has become incredibly sensitive; especially in the scroll up/down department (I don’t want to think about what’s causing it to malfunction since its Cousteau-esque adventure). This stops me from scrolling up and down message histories, meaning that I have to commit entire conversations to memory and then hope that my replies cover everything. Too bad if someone refers to a message they sent a couple of days ago, that baby is gone. In a Zen kind of way it’s somewhat refreshing to be constrained to the present, but in an actual day-to-day want to live successfully kind of way it’s shit.

As attached as I have been to my Blackberry, I’m excited about my new phone. I've been checking the order status hourly and telling anybody who'll listen about my purchase. My childish glee may say something about the attractiveness of Google products, because generally I try not to let material objects determine my emotions. This is clearly a lie if you read my Blackberry post, but in any case as someone who tries not to buy into new product bullshit I’m somewhat embarrassed about the daydreams my imminent new phone has induced. 

I’ve been imagining the endless range of apps and games I’ll be able to download, and how I’ll suddenly become infinitely more valuable to my friends, because while they’re all struggling to load an Apple maps page on their iPhone I’ll be whizzing around with the greatest of ease on Google maps (or, you know, something else that people do with smartphones. I wouldn't know). Even stupid stuff that I know I don’t care about—such as the Nexus always being the first phone to receive Android updates when they come out—has me pinching myself as if I’m in some sort of wonderful dream.

And this is all before the phone has even arrived. At the time of writing, the order status is still ‘Pending’*, so I technically haven’t even paid for it yet. Which leads to the real reason I’m worried. I’m not even a Nexus owner and already I feel like I’ve become a massive Google tool. I’m going to be that person at parties who starts talking about all the reasons their semi-obscure phone is vastly superior to everybody else’s and have all sorts of little stupid apps to prove it. I’m going to be that person in the supermarket using Google Goggles to take photos of all the products and then read other Google tools’ reviews of them. I’m going to inadvertently check the wrong box while browsing my Gmail account and sign away my power of attorney to Sergey Brin.

This is troubling because I’ve often been asked why I don’t own/want an iPhone. I usually mumble something about not wanting to be a mindless drone to a giant corporation. And then I go and buy a Nexus. I suck.

*It's probably frozen because they've discovered I use Hotmail.