3 posts tagged “cellular phone”
In the world of retail Christmas is the season to be jolly, because the holiday rush makes up a major component of nearly every store's yearly revenue. The holidays are when the dollars leave the wallet, and the customers leave ladden down with packages. So why is my store so slow?
Oh there's been a slight increase in traffic into the store, but nothing like our summer months. Sales are down, activations are generally down and most of the people who are coming into the store are either coming in with problems or just doing the regular daily business of owning cell phones.
The trouble with cell phones and Christmas is that they're kind of a shitty gift. They're great if you're a parent buying you kid a phone, because you're going to be paying for their contract anyway, but for almost anyone else it's really bad. Why?
First off most phones are hundreds of dollars cheaper on a contract than they are to just buy. So why buy someone something for $500 that they can get for $75 on their own? To get it at that cheaper price requires a contract but very few people want to be giving someone a three year comitment to a monthly payment plan.
Santa: "Hello Timmy I got you a new cell phone. It's just going to cost you $43 a month for the next three years."
Timmy: "Fuck you Santa."
The Klingons have a saying, you know this is going to be a great post when it starts by referencing Star Trek, "Today is a good day to die." You know that's supposed to sum up their warrior culture and their willingness to die in batte. Great great. Great, great I understand glorious death in battle, check. Those crazy Klingons.
For me today might be a good day to die, though not for honour in battle but only because everything I touch today seems to just fuck up on me. Examples? My alarm did not wake me up today, so when I woke up to see that I was supposed to be at work in one minute I assumed I wouldn't be able to make it.
Thankfully I had forgotten about the world falling back onto daylight savings time, and so I had an hour extra and I made it to work on time. Yet I now no longer trust the alarm in my phone to wake me up, despite the fact that it's worked fine for months. It went off, it just was not loud enough to wake me from the coma I had fallen into.
Getting to work on time was nice. What wasn't nice was when I discovered that the store had no paper, at all. I went to print something and heard the familiar "out of paper" sound that our printer makes, so I went to get some more from the drawer. None there, so onto the supply closet, none there, so into the product room and again there was none. Now we use a lot of paper, and without it I basically can't do anything. So I had to close the store and go buy more at Future Shop.
Really no paper?
So two of the things I rely on today have failed me, and now I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. Thankfully I don't have to drive, otherwise my brakes might fail. I think the best course of action is either to kill myself now in fear of what is coming or get home as soon as I can after work and hide behind my couch in the fetal position. So my new saying is, "Today is either a good day to die, or a good day to hide behind a couch weeping like a little girl."
I bet it sounds cooler in Klingon.
I remember the days of my Nokia 2160, when it was exciting that I was able to send text messages from my phone to another phone. It was the first digital phone on the market and none of my friends had cell phones back then so being able to text message was cool but useless since I had nobody to text. Back then it was good just for looking cool and being used as an actual phone. Then they started to add cameras, video, video games and other features to cell phones they were adding a lot of crap that really never worked great. Sure Snake on the Nokia 6160 was a great time waster, but very few interesting pictures have been taken with camera phones, and the N-Gage video game phone was a bust.
What did work though was email when Canada's Research In Motion released the BlackBerry devices. At first they were like pagers, stand-alone devices just for email, but as time went on they became phones as well. First they were large things, but now they've started to slim down and with the release of the Pearl they've finally gotten to a point where they have mass market appeal, and a camera.
I've always liked BlackBerry. Their phones work, really well and the ability to send and recieve email from a small device on my hip is much more useful than I would have assumed. Now with a camera I can photo blog, and post from the go. I had that ability with previous phones, blogging with my BlackBerry is something I've done for years now, but this is the first time I've had a phone with both a decent camera and a good way to type. As a Vancouver based blogger I was given a Nokia 6682 to use and while I liked the camera trying to type on it was such a pain in the ass that I gave up. However the Sure Type on the BlackBerry Pearl is so easy to use that I'm back to blogging on the go, and uploading my pictures directly to Flickr.
The Pearl is also the first BlackBerry that's really good looking. Before people would look at my BlackBerry (I've had a 7280, 7290, 8700 and 7130) and wince. They might be able to understand how it could be useful, but it never had the visual appeal to interest someone who might otherwise be looking at a Motorola Razr or similiar flashy but useless piece of garbage. The Pearl though is sexy, slender and the sort of phone that makes people want to touch it, play with it and then own it.
The camera is pretty good, a 1.3 megapixel affair, but doesn't really handle low light conditions too well. With third party software it works well with both my iMac G5 and my Macbook. Adding a memory card allows the phone to show up on the desktop like an external drive and I've been able to load both AAC and MP3 files into its music player. I've yet to be able to figure out how to encode video to play on the device, and so I can't say how well that works. Truth be told I won't be using the music player much. It's nice to be able to use my music as ringtones, but I still perfer the ease of using my iPod to the still some what clunky audio player interface. Plus I listen to a lot of Podcasts and the nice thing about the iPod is that it can remember where I was while listening to the Podcast so that if I have to stop and then start later on I won't have to re-listen to a portion, something the Pearl and no other (non-iTunes) music phone is able to do yet.
All in all the Pearl is the best phone I've seen yet. I still would perfer a full keyboard as opposed to having to trust the phone's keystroke recognition software, but that would make the phone bigger. I don't actually mind the bigger phones like the 8700, but a nice small one is really cool. The Pearl is the best phone out on the market for my needs (which includes mobile blogging, email and of course talking). It would be nice if it featured Wi-Fi and the ability to do VoIP calling but those are things that have never really been well intergraded into a cellular phone so their omission is not a big deal.
Note: With the exception of the top picture (of the Pearl itself) all of the photos that are included in this post were taken with my BlackBerry Pearl's built in camera.
