I’ll freely admit it: I’m a total hypocrite. For years I’ve pish-poshed the whole concept of owning a cellphone. Even when I worked for the Internet division of Canada’s largest telco and cellphones were everywhere, I resisted. It just seemed silly and superfluous. After all, there’s payphones, right?
Alas, at my last job I was forced to own a company cellphone by management. After hearing all of the reasons why they wanted me to carry one, I begrudgingly joined the rest of the cellphone-toting world.
As expected, I’ve come around to realizing (duh) how convenient they really are. I still think they’re noisemakers for the devil though - I still cringe and think violent thoughts when some goofball’s cellphone playing some lame-ass tune pierces my eardrums…
One thing that still drives me nuts about phones, though, is trying to use the useless keypad. There’s nothing more trying than entering in some long name into a phone with an alpha-numeric keypad. Try typing a name like “occhionero” into your phone and see how long you last before you go insane. These days, cellphones have a ton of cool functions (calendar, phone book, reminders), but getting all of your info into it is an exercise in frustration.
So it was very cool to read this BBC article about a company that redesigned the phone keypad in a completely ingenious way. They basically gave each letter its own button, and fit the entire keyboard into an area 1/3rd the size of a business card. What I wanna know is: can I upgrade my phone?
