Blackberry

A week and a half ago, I destroyed the screen of my Blackberry by putting it in my pockets, which made it turn black and look sad. Such wimpiness. Luckily, I got a replacement, but it was a three-year old Blackberry Curve, which was The Big Thing in Hong Kong in 2008. There were huge advertising hoardings for it outside the MTR stations in Central, and everything.

It was horrible to go back.

Although the older phone had a stupendous battery life (at least three days between charges) that seemed to be because you couldn't do anything with it. I'm not concerned about whether I can play Angry Birds or not, I'd just like a phone with a working stopwatch, or a countdown timer so I can not burn dinner, or a 5 megapixel camera I never use, or any of the other things that I've had on phones since at least 2007.

It's not as if my newer Blackberry was really that much better. Sure, it can now run a few applications, but there's still no way to progam the alarm to wake you up at one time in the week and a different time at the weekend.

So I struggled for a week with the older phone, ground down by the gloominess of something that you can type emails on and really not much else, and wondered whether this amounted to an improvement in productivity or not.

And then today, oh frabjous day, my old new Blackberry came back!

Except while the screen is fixed, the 'R' button has sort of given up the ghost - not enough to stop working entirely, but enough to need 2.19 keypresses to get it to work, which means you either end up witing eveything incoectly, or pound the R button into submission and end up rrrolling your rrrrs like some maniac from (insert your quaint village in Europe herrrre). The one thing that was really good about the Blackberry - being able to type fast and not be distracted by anything else - is now in tatters. Or tatterrrRrs.

I wonder if that's why people use iphones and not Blackberries. Or should I just be wondering about taking the phone back and trying to persuade them it needs all 35 keys to be in full working order. Is that too much to ask?