IgloONotes

The use of a cell phone way back when they were invented was to simply do one function: make a call. All it had was a simple keypad, a battery pack, some electronics and you could make a call without being tethered to the wall. Yes, they were bulky but they must have been pretty simple to use. You picked up the phone, and dialed it just like you would at home.

I've had a cell phone for about one and a half years and the end of my two year contract is coming close. I've been looking around at all these fancy candybars and sliders, but I can't seem to decide which one I want.

Nowadays there's so many features in our phones that even Bill Gates would have trouble using them. To start at the bottom, there's a phonebook that can store more friends numbers than you would ever have on Facebook. Then you have an organizer to remind you of your impending doom and games so you can waste your life in front of a little screen.

Don't even think that I've named everything that you can stuff into your phone. Everyone has stuffed a camera into theirs and not having one is just unreal. Heck, Nokia's N95 has more megapixels than my digital camera.

Apple has managed to fit an iPod into their phone, or is it a phone into an iPod? I could keep rambling on and on about all the 'features' of new phones but then you'd look at me and ask where I came from, Mars?

Phones should have three things:
1. A screen you can see in direct sunlight
2. A comfortable keypad
3. Organizer and phonebook

Every other feature I consider as fluff. Take the iPhone for example. I met a guy who had one and being a techie aficionado, I had to check it out. In short, I was dissapointed. It was big, heavy and worst of all, uncomfortable to use.

I tried holding it up to my ear just to make a call, but it felt like I was holding a calculator to make a call. Plus, the ultra-smooth shell of the phone made it feel like it was about to slip out of my hands at any moment, not the feeling you want to have while walking along the street. In addition, the much touted touch keypad was a bane to use while text messaging, something I do quite often.

On the iPhone of course, you can store pictures, play music, surf the web, and all that jazz, but it begs the question...why?

Why do you need to check Facebook on your little phone? Why do you need to look at pictures of your friends wiping out on ice? Thanks to society, we need to be connected to the outside world at every moment of our life.

My answer to all of that? Just get a phone that makes calls and text messages well. You don't need all the other things because standalone cameras have superior picture quality and surfing the net on a laptop is 10 times better than on a phone,  I guarantee.

So what does this leave me with? If I get a phone with none of the extraneous features, I'll be back in the days of the neanderthal. Yet, If I get one with just one of the things I need, the phone will inevitably contain more than I would ever use. I guess my only answer is, let my contract run dry and borrow my friend's phones. Like, duh...

Tags: cell phones, iphone