Dear Nokia:
Hi. I’m Rands. I recently purchased your Nokia 3360 cellular phone and I’m very happy to report that you guys are done. You’ve won. PARTY IN FINLAND.
The 3360 is as far as you need to go it. It’s the perfect size — small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, but not so small that it’s unclear what you’re actually retrieving from your pocket when something is vibrating.
The software is slick, easy to learn, I’m grooving on the animated icons and if the company wasn’t too cheap to cover text messaging, I’d be even more in love with the type-ahead dictionary. Hell, you’ve even nailed the elusive teen demographic with the XPRESS-ON COLOR COVERS HURRRRRRRR.
The buttons click pleasantly and, to top it all off, the phone has the reassuring weight that gives me the impression (right or wrong) that I can drop this sucker and pay no consequence.
I do have one complaint. Your cell phone has depressed the shit out of me.
When I purchased the new phone, AT&T Wireless was good enough to transfer my old number over… voice mail and all. How simple is that?
Why they didn’t transfer over was all the phone number in my old phone.
Now, I’ve got sixty+ numbers in my phone which means once I’d acclimated to the new phone, I needed to sit down and manually transfer each number by hand. Now, being a tidy guy,I had no real problem with this… what I was not expecting was A REEVALUATION OF MY LIFE.
With each number that I transferred over, I had to ask the question, "Do I still need this number?" The answer was usually an obvious "yes", but there several miscellaneous "maybes". These maybes required follow-up questions such as "When was the last time you called this person?", "When was the last time they called?"… suddenly I’m going through my life on a person by person basis having realizations like, "Jesus, I really don’t like this person… why I am wasting my time?" or "That bitch hasn’t called in a month,
she’s gone".
This seems like a lot of introspection simply because some twits in Finland can’t figure out how to automagically transfer phone numbers. Seriously. Why am I have heated internal debates with myself simply because I wanted my phone to look cool?
Nokia, there is a huge business opportunity here. It will cost you billions of dollars and you’ll need to convince a good portion of the planet that
you’re trustworthy. It’s a simple idea. It’s a central place where all the personal information that I choose to expose is stored. This is place is easy accessible from any device which has some type of connection to
the Internet.
A simple example of this place in action would be my new cell phone. Rather than viciously raping and pillaging my circle of friends, I would simply download all my numbers from this central repository and avoid significant emotional anguish.
There are obvious and non-obvious uses for this central repository which make it a TREMENDOUSLY HUGE IDEA, but I’m asking you, for the good of my emotional sanity, to start small, do it right, and leave me to my ignorance.
-rands