Last week I took a trip with my partner in crime to the local T-Mobile dealer. We were there looking for a new phone that would allow us to test thier GPRS data service as well as test a WAP site in their phone. We ended up getting the Sony Ericsson T300.

All in all this is a nice phone, simple but with a plethora of features. It has a calendar, polyphonic speaker (those crazy new rings you might be hearing in the mall), e-mail, multimedia messaging, a camera that attaches to the phone, and WAP enabled web browsing. All this for a moderate price of $99.

With that long list of features you may have easily missed something. This phone came with a camera. A CAMERA! Accompanying this phone in the box was a TINY little camera that plugs into the bottom and allows you to take pictures and send it to other phone users or e-mail. Now, don get me wrong, when we got this phone we thought, “hmm, cool” and then tossed the camera aside. We never thought twice about it how there was a CAMERA THAT ATTACHED TO THE CELLULAR PHONE. And for 99 bucks at that.

We are in an age where nothing surprises us. Either you are at an age that you see so much technology that nothing is shocking, or you are just too old to care anymore. That how much new stuff is out there. Every day we have more technology pushed on us and are told that we can live without. Products change so drastically from month to month, that nothing seems to be mind-blowing. Well, everything except Tivo.

I have a laptop that I sit on my couch with and browse the web. It not attached to anything. It getting the internet through a wireless signal. Data through the AIR! But yet I sit on my couch and go about using it while thinking to myself, man I wish the local transfers were a little faster. My Xbox will play any game from any video game system ever made (sans new generation consoles). I have 360 full albums on something that is no larger than a deck of cards. I have AOL instant messenger on my phone. I edit video from my camcorder and burn it to a DVD with moving menus in less than an hour. I take pictures with my camera and check to see if it “came out right”. Then I take it home and within 4 clicks I waiting for a cloth bound hardcover book of those pictures to arrive in the mail. My laptop weighs 4.9 lbs. But I never stop to think how incredible some of this stuff is. No one does.

I was in line the other day and heard a woman complain about how her phone wasn retrieving her e-mail correctly. All I could think was, jeez, you have a PHONE in your pocket that you take WHEREVER YOU GO. Isn that enough?! Doesn that impress you? No its not. No it doesn. How could it? A phone that takes pictures came out the day she was bragging about her new phone that retrieves e-mail.

We are just getting into the technology age. What we have seen so far is nothing compared to what will come. Maybe we just need to remember what it was like to have to pull over and pay 25c to make a phone call to appreciate this phone we carry around in our pocket. I mean come on there is some CRAZY stuff out there that we use on a daily basis and we just complain about how it doesn work. We forget about how long its been out or what it takes to enable it. Did you know that in 1993 there was no World Wide Web? And now we have it accessible to our portable phones. Hell its even in the “air”.

There is just so much new technology around us, how COULD we get excited about something new when companies just give us something better in 3 months. Maybe we don need any of this stuff. Me? I a geek, and I love it, and I want more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 10th, 2002 at 6:00 am and is filed under Technology. 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.