My Phone is Better than Your Phone!

I got my first cell phone back in 1992, a Motorola flip phone which, for the time, was quite an astonishingly small piece of gear. It was a phone. No Internet. No games. No contact list. No frills of any kind.

Got it because I'm a gear freak; a boy-toy junky...not because I particularly like talking on a phone. Frankly, it is quite the opposite. Most of the time, I prefer to be lost...be total anonymous...total unfound.

Even so, I'd alway said that I want my phone to just be a phone...nothing else. In fact, next to fax machines, I've always been kinda phone-stupid. If I needed something set correctly on the phone, I'd just let one of the local teens do it. Funny thing, really. Kids can navigate through a 1-9-7 menu combination on a Nokia...from memory...in a fraction of a second...to fix something that would take me days to fix...yet that same kid can't remember to keep his damn bike from blocking my front door.

I've never wanted my cell phone doing anything much but receiving calls...or being there for me in an emergency...or for when I'm required to "check in" with the aforementioned wife. By the way, I'm quite sure that makes me no different from any other married man with 3 kids, 3 cats, a dog, and a bunch of squirrels that infest the attic.

So it's ironic that my wife, Helen, would be the person who gifted me the first cellphone I actually enjoyed a few years ago, a Pocket PC that just happened to have a functioning phone built in. It had a stylus and a sliding keyboard, which we nice features, but the phone was otherwise a little clunky. Even so, it did a lot of useful things.

Now, I have a cell phone that is better than your cell phone. Yes, even better than your Blackberry.

So, next time you see me on the observing field levelling my scope's tripod with my phone...or checking the moon phase with my phone...or using my phone as a red flashlight...or controlling the laptop remotely with my phone...well, just remember that you too could have an iPhone!