cellphones
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You are viewing stuff tagged with cellphones.
Called Mykala today over my lunch hour and the phone picked up, but instead of Mykala, I got: “bahbuhdee BAH… buhdee… Dada. DAHDAH.” My heart felt like it was going to melt.
To translate: Ess has a book that she reads with Nannie about hedgehogs, and they go to the playground. On one page the hedgehogs go swinging, they go back and forth. Nannie rocks Essie back and forth for this page, and Ess loves it so much that she has begun to do it on her own and when something, anything resembling a pendulum, is swinging, she says BAH buhdee. I’ll try to catch a video of it. Try.
When people are grocery shopping with headphones on or when they’re totally absorbed in a text message conversation at the gym, I first thought such behavior simply annoyed me. I thought that these people’s disregard for their surroundings bothered me because it put more of what can only be described as dead weight in my path, forcing me to find a passage around inert obstacles that are unaware and unwilling to acknowledge my presence. Then I realized it wasn’t my forced reroute that troubled me but rather that first part—these folk’s lack of awareness.
Despite its ungainly title, “Saussure, Predictive Text, Cycling Awake and the word ‘Book’” is an interesting article. Here’s the thesis: two unrelated books on your bookshelf can become associated in your memory, simply because they are next to one another. Similarly, two unrelated words on your phone can become associated in your memory, simply because T9 predictive text puts them next to one another. As a result, language grows in richness, because new associations are made on the bookshelves of our phones. It’s a really neat idea, one that has produced real-world results. For example, the word “Zonino” is “text misprediction” for “WooHoo!”
Today, I saw a four year old (I didn’t get a look at her teeth so I can’t tell you for sure, but I’m pretty sure she was four) on a cell phone. Having a conversation. While walking next to her father. I’m always making sarcastic remarks about how young kids are starting earlier and earlier with cell phones, but confronted with the reality of it in person, it made me feel more sad than smug.
For what it’s worth, my cell phone is thicker (by about a third) than the thickest point on Apple’s newest laptop, the MacBook Air. The thinnest part of the MacBook Air is 6 times thinner than my cell phone.
This commercial for Cingular (now AT&T) is the one with the butcher… and it is hilarious. “I mean… we probably weigh the…” Brilliant ad by BBDO.
This is what happens when churches and cell phone towers mix.
Make your Mac know when you return and leave - Here’s a nifty thing for those Mac users out there to try (not me, darnit). Anyway, using this nifty little hack, you can make your Mac pause your iTunes, set your iChat away status, turn on the screensaver, etc. when you walk away. This is done by detecting when your Bluetooth enabled phone is out of range.
Colbert Report’s hilarious take on the AT&T merger - The accompanying diagram is great.
Best phone I’ve seen in years - Ok, get this. This MOTOFONE F3 cell phone I linked to a bit ago … it looks amazing in these pictures. It does nothing extraneous … no pictures, no silly color screen; all in a 9mm thin package. It gets a reported 400 hours of standby time … take a quarter of that to make it realistic and you still get over 4 days of standby time.
The FONE is simply a cell phone, nothing more - It does phone things well, and that’s IT. Thank goodness.
The successor to the RAZR - You thought the RAZR was the smallest phone out there? This upcoming phone by Motorola, codenamed “Canary,” makes the RAZR look like a wide load. Impressive.
Awesome cell phone attachment - Ok, it looks like a rotary phone receiver, with a curly cord and everything, but then it plugs into your cell phone. So basically, you are talking into a phone receiver with the cord running into your pocket.
Why oh why oh why is there not just one simple little feature for cell phones: a skip-to-leave-a-voicemail function/key sequence? Lovely as my girlfriend’s voice is, I already know she is going to tell me to leave a message and that she will get back to me. I already know she is not available. And goodness, I already know (if I’m listening to a Verizon-serviced phone) how to leave a voicemail. Is this a money-making move? I suspect it is. Keeping customers on the phone longer (the call begins when voicemail picks up) allows phone companies to make good money in very small increments. Consider this: Cingular features a direct to web button on most of their phones which, if pushed, almost always transfers web data before the user can mash enough buttons to stop the transfer (or in my case, try to rip the battery out) before charges are incurred.
Invsible Shield - The first gadget protection I’ve seen that carries products for my cell phone (Moto V551), MP3 player (iPod 4g 20 gig), and my camera (Canon Digital Rebel EOS 300). I’d have bought this for my camera had I known about it. That’s ok, the current protector on there gets the job done.
Free text messages using your email - This is awesome - simply prefix the person’s phone number behind an @____.com address, and you can send text messages to anyone for free! To send a text message to me, it’s myphone#@cingularme.com - cool.
Backpack that Charges Your Cell Phone - This takes the up-and-down movement of the load in your backpack and translates it into up to 7 watts of electrical energy. This makes so much sense for college students and city dwellers.
Yesterday, I has the privilege of witnessing the fastest cell-phone-turn-off in the history of panicked faux-paus committing individuals. Indeed, only 3 or 4 notes (notes!) of the beginning of an annoying ring sung out until the individual responsible (a business major in the third row) instinctively flinched, silencing the sound. It was almost so short that the pause in the class was everyone checking their sub-conscious, wondering if it was just a random synapse firing that had caused them to think of what they did.
Telephones, telecommunications, telephone conversations, telemarketers, and even televangelists have become a part of our everyday lives. Like the refrigerator, television, and increasingly the computer, phones are a simple part of everyday life. Few recall (and even fewer care to imagine) what life was like before one’s neighbors were merely a handset away, or when that handset failed to successfully connect. “Only one in 50 …” of the people in the 2000 census did not have a telephone in their homes (Detroit News). So, how has a device with such a stunning impact on our business, consumer, and social lifestyles changed over the years? And, more importantly, how has it changed us?