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.