Saturday, February 12, 2011

To All the Phones I've Loved Before


"Well, I am writing to you now because I have some news, and I wanted you to hear it from me first. My dalliance with that trim new Droid from Verizon is over, too. In Facebook terms, the relationship was complicated."

-- from my public breakup letter to AT&T's iPhone, posted this morning on NPR's "All Tech Considered" blog.

My letter reveals me to be the shallow serial cellular dater that a coworker accused me of being the other day. ("Technology enthusiast or cellular manwhore?" another coworker tweeted after reading my "sordid" story this morning.)

Some of the initial reader comments on my posting were interesting. One reader wrote that we should stop thinking that any particular company or product is magic: "Time to think of products as products and services as services."

Another said, "I really think its the serial phone daters that drive up the price of what is essentially a commodity (chip sets, internal parts OEM'd from the same manufacturers, eerily similar features on different OS). A smartphone is a smartphone."

I know they're right, of course. I keep telling myself that, too. And then I gaze at those pretty screens, and, well, I'm lost all over again.

Happy Valentine's Day.

(Candy Heart made at http://www.cryptogram.com/hearts/)