By Nadine Kam

The phone: temporarily silent.

Well, bachi on me. I always used to laugh when people don’t know how to use their cel phones, usually making the excuse that it’s new. It’s not like they’re really so different when it comes to address book or message retrieval functions.

So, a day after picking up a white Blackberry Pearl, my sim card is back in my old phone until I can figure out how to work the new one. Never mind that I seem to have broken part of my new phone by trying to open it. I don’t know. Some spring popped out, but it doesn’t seem necessary. It’s not like I watched the phone guy when he transferred the sim card from the old phone to the new because I believed it was something that only needs to be done once. But this time, I had to do it to retrieve my phone book from the old phone. Apparently, I’d been saving them to the phone, not the card, so my numbers didn’t move over with the card. I ended up having to copy all the numbers on paper for transfer at a later date. Tedious.

Maybe I should have listened more closely to one of my friends, who, as I was walking into T-Mobile, called and told me how she had just sold her new Blackberry Pearl on eBay because she could never get the hang of the dual-letter keypad.

I’ve succumbed to many a clothing trend, but never an electronic one before. A new phone is definitely not something I needed, but it’s hard to resist when phone service providers are offering up their latest and greatest models to lure us into two-year contracts.

A generic Motorola gets glammed up with mirror and charms.

Like any accessory, our phones are an extension of our aesthetic sensibilities. One of my friends is waiting for her current phone contract to end before getting a new phone, but feels her basic Motorola is “not very cute,” so dressed it up with a $2 mirror from Claire’s. Isn’t it so weird how we’re so obsessed with cuteness or personalization that all our accessories have their own accessories these days, whether purse charms, cel phone charms or zipper pulls? Sort of makes you wonder how future historians will judge us. My cel phones have always had clothes. With limited offerings, the last one was dressed in black Body Glove, which was rubbery enough to bounce whenever I dropped it.

In the Blackberry Pearl’s case, just by offering up colors like red and gold, I was there. My white phone is now dressed in a bright pink skin (since that spring went flying, that might be holding the phone together).

It’s funny how new services/diversions also seem to dictate our new needs. To be honest, I bought the phone mostly because I got somewhat addicted to the one-sentence format of Twitter.com. Everybody’s been warning me, “Don’t do it!” But it’s too late!

Having mobile email and Internet service will probably be nice, I think most people would agree, but really, I got along fine before without it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 12:54 am and is filed under media, Obsessions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.