the daily snivel

I learned recently that a lovely friend of mine was so displeased with her old cell phone and its unfailing talent for dropping calls during the middle of a conversation (it was a Motorola V220, just like my current phone) that she actually threw it against a wall and happily destroyed it. I've found that people either love or hate this phone. I've personally had no problems with it, but then I deliberately purchased it because it was the cheapest flip phone I could possibly find, and I knew full well that would entail a bit of compromise. For example, it has the worst digital camera going. Everything I try to photograph is blurry and embarrassingly low-res, not to mention the fact that some microscopic scratch or piece of dust has permanently found a place on the lens such that a big weird dark blob appears just off centre in whatever the focus of your photograph is (and thus is the world deprived of pictures of my penis).

But I digress.

I approve of smashing cell phones in general. People still have little concept of proper manners when using their phones in public, and I'm amazed at how ubiquitous they've become. For some time I was keeping up a collection of cell phones that I actually found abandoned on the road (I thought this really said something about the disposable nature of cell phones, though whenever it was possible to track down the owner I would do so) with the express intention of smashing them and making some big Artistic statement about the whole thing, but as time passed my creative whims flowed elsewhere and I was left with what was essentially just hazardous waste containers with good industrial design -- which were recycled in due course.

Anyway, the reason I got my original cheap ass phone was because I was moving back to Ottawa from Toronto and, having only a friend's house to fly to, there was really no way to get a land line, and no sense in doing so given how much time I'd be spending at work anyway. Now that I'm in my swanky apartment, it still makes sense just to have the one mobile phone.

My aforementioned friend asked me to give her dibs on smashing this phone just as soon as my current contract was up sometimes next fall and I found a replacement. For some time I was thinking (being a lawyer and all) that my next phone would be a Blackberry. As of today, however, I know what my next telephone will be.



As soon as this is released in Canada, we have ourselves a V220 smashing date.



No buttons. Touch screen interface. Wide screen video playback. 2.0 megapixel camera. Wireless internet browsing. Integrated e-mail and virtual keyboard.

Honestly, I had a hard time believing the rumours that Apple would create its own mobile phone because it was hard for me to conceive of how they would differentiate themselves in a bloated market, but now that they've done it I have to admit: I was wrong. That is one goddamn nice phone.