the corner office : Progress?

Progress?

I hate sending SMS's on my cell phone with a passion only the most horrid and unpleasant things deserve. As a touch-typist, I find it the most frustrating thing. Beep-beep-beep-H-beep-beep-E-beep-beep-beep-L-throw phone out window.

Vodacom has an SMS page on their web site. Nowadays, if I want to send SMS's via their site, I have to register (for free, nogal), but I must now be a Vodacom subscriber. I get access to a million features I'll never want to use, and I can only send SMS's to other Vodacom subscribers. Ditto for MTN. This means that if I as a Vodacom subscriber want to send an SMS to an MTN number, the only way for me to do it is to sit and ham-fingeredly beep-beep type the message on my cellphone. Given that I am a condescending git, I also flat refuse to use cellphonese and instead type words out properly.

What pisses me off the most is that in the good old days you could send cross-network SMS's, with absolute ease. These bastards were so eager to get you to their website vs the competition's, that even international SMS's were only URL away. Now that they have everyone hooked, we get a million more 'features' but the core service is completely crippled.

I think someone else said the same thing in another context today: this is not what I call progress.

(Why am I trying to SMS? It's nearly 4, and there is no way I'm getting up to meet my personal trainer at 7. Hope the SMS doesn't wake him, except that he gets up in an hour's time anyway, poor dude).

{2004.02.13 03:49}

Comments:

1. jmichael (2004.02.13 - 14:51) #

You mean your cellphone doesn't have the nifty T9 directory feature? Come on, it's 2004, they've had that for years now.

Basically, the editor does a pretty good job of recognizing which word you'll want to type. Most of the time, you'll only need to hit each key once. The words can look really weird while you're typing and it's still trying to figure out what this is supposed to be.

quick example: type "corner"

hit (2-abc), display shows "A".
hit (6-mno), display shows "An".
hit (7-pqrs), display shows "Cop".
hit (6-mno), display shows "Born".
hit (3-def), display shows "Borne".
hit (7-pqrs), display shows "Corner".

best part, once you have e.g. "has" typed up, you can hit (*) repeatedly to scroll through other possibilities (gas, gap, hap, icq). Oh yeah, the dictionary also learns new words.

It's f*ing amazing!

2. Rudi (2004.02.13 - 15:25) #

Cellphones. I love technology, but for the life of me I just can't get used to the idea of cellphones. I think I'm allergic to the idea of being traceable 24/7. My wife gave me one a while back ... every afternoon she'd tell me the SMS's she sent to me during the day in person ... every Wednesday she'd take it from my briefcase and recharge it.

I think she eventually gave it to her aunt or something...

Just give me a keyboard and a internet connection with all the bells and whistles imageanable and I'm happy.

3. Colin (2004.02.13 - 21:17) #

jmichael, I probably should upgrade. The reason I don't have predictive text (I believe that's what it's called?) is because I've still got an old Nokia circa 2000. (I don't even know what the model is :)

The reason I haven't upgraded is because I'm pretty much like Rudi - I've been entitled to an upgrade on my contract for ages, but I just can't be arsed because I never use it. I only keep my phone for emergencies and trying to find friends at shopping malls. I'm the only person at our company whose business card purposefully doesn't have a cell number :)