I have a Blackberry. I know a lot of other people who have a Blackberry. I know more people with assorted phones with qwerty keyboards on them. What this means and apparently what advertising/marketing  monkeys have failed to grasp is that a lot of us aren’t looking at standard phone dials anymore.  That means that we don’t have ABC above the number 1 and it makes it hard to decipher alphabetic phone numbers. What that also means is that when somebody asks me to dial 800-CleverNumberThatSpellsTheirName I either have to go to a site like phonespell.org or, more often than not, not call them.

When I was taking marketing classes, the object of advertising was to make people want to use your product or service. This fails in the most astounding way if you make somebody want to use your product but then make it really difficult to get to.  I can’t possibly be the first person to notice this since Blackberrys  have been required equipment for every upper level management wonk for approximately the last 10 years.

I mean, seriously, I understand that numbers are tricky for people to remember but it’s nothing like trying to remember what letters appeared above what numbers on a phone dial and decoding that in your head. I could totally buy into phone “numbers” becoming alphabetic like domain names but since telephone companies have all the innovative capacity of Neanderthals I don’t see that happening any time soon. They still seem to think area code splits are a good idea. I’m hoping Google Voice (and services like it) will change this someday.

I just downloaded and installed the Wordpress for Blackberry app so now I can blog from wherever I happen to be. Honestly, I don’t see me doing huge posts from my phone but it will be extra cool from breaking stuff while I’m away from my computer.

Back in January, I posted about the death of old media and posited that the order of their death would be newspapers, tv, then radio because there wasn’t a mobile equivalent to radio for your car. In 4 months, technology has proven me wrong. In the last week or so a client has appeared for Pandora and Slacker for my Blackberry. After using both for a little while, I can safely say that radio is doomed too. If you’re familiar with my opinion of Clear Channel and the other fucktards in charge of radio these days then you’ll already know that the day can’t come fast enough as far as I’m concerned.

Why the hell would you listen to stuff programmed by somebody else when you can set up exactly the stuff you want to listen to? Especially when it recommends things based on your likes. There you go.