Twitterphone

My phone is either nearing the end of its useful life, or reaching the start of some new useful life; I’m not sure which.

Its one true calling is as a terminal for Twitter, and that task it does admirably. Everything else is marginal or slow at best. But Twitter and a fast keyboard makes up for all of that.

The phone in question is a Blackberry Pearl with one of those squooshed keyboards that makes typing an adventure but also lets the phone fit into very small places. I loathe the idea of getting an Android phone without a good keyboard, and an iPhone is just not appealing for the price. I don’t need another Blackberry because, hey, I have my Twitterphone!

When all you have is a Twitterphone, every problem looks like Twitter. Need to search for a restaurant, report a problem with squeaky brakes, look for a weather report, pretty much anything – Twitter. And to the extent that your world is Twitter shaped, that’s a reasonable excuse for a device to carry with you everywhere.

I am sure that if I got some other device, that some other strong point of it would come to the fore. I’m sure there’s a perfect phone for Facebook, a ideal device for LinkedIn, a super handset for your employer’s Android application. The question of search for “which device do I want” becomes impossible because you know that you will adapt to whatever you have rather than discarding it, to some extreme extent of making or losing friends because of what you hold in your hand.

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