When will it stop? When will we stop inventing things that allow us to be in greater contact with more people so that we can do more, be more productive? I thought the whole purpose of inventing technology to do our work for us is that we’d have more leisure time? I guess not. Now we can check email on our phones…just another way to be connected to the world. Barrie installed some free software on his phone that allows him to be logged in to MSN Messenger all of the time so he can chat (for free) wherever he is. But is being “more” productive such a good thing? Do we allow ourselves to put down our cellphones and actually be present when having coffee with someone else? Have we lost the meaning of silence…and of disconnecting/unplugging for a while?

Those rants aside, Blackberry brings in some rather large positives – the biggest one being the impending death of sms. With the capability to send and receive emails anywhere, why bother to sms? The more people that get connected, the better. Hey, if we’re all logged in to Messenger on our phones we don’t need to sms Barrie any more – we just chat with him on our phones. No more paying for sms’s!
I wonder how the cellphone companies will try to stop this loss of revenue? I’ve always thought sms’s should be a free value-add to our cellphones anyway – after all, from a technical perspective, they’re really tiny bits of data which don’t take up much bandwidth (except when everyone is smsing – like New Year’s Eve). And why the arbitrary limit of 124 characters (or whatever it is)? Why should I pay more for an sms which is 130 characters? Why isn’t the default number of sms characters 1000? Simple – it comes down to cash. How much revenue do New Years Eve’s billions of sms’s generate? So it will be interesting to watch the cost of Blackberry devices and contracts over the next few months.
In summary…Down with Blackberry! Long live Blackberry!