Smart Phones Reviewed

I mentioned in an earlier post that Smart Phones are not named that because they make you smarter, but because it requires some intelligence to operate them.

This has been painfully clear to me on a regular basis in the last week or so, mostly because Samil has one of these phones.

To review: Samil this summer decided he REALLY wanted Pandora Radio on his phone. He wanted this at the expense of being able to accept text messages and add entries into his contact book. I sold him an extra memory card I had, which I hoped would resolve this situation, but he didn't put it into his phone for a number of weeks. This made his phone situation difficult while we were attempting to find an apartment, but also came into play when we were trying to get our Internet set up. Ultimately, Samil was hesitant to spend the 2 minutes it would take to do that because he's technically borrowing this Blackberry Pearl and will be moving to the Palm Pre, something he is very excited about.

Last week I got two calls during one class while I was teaching. After the class I saw it was Samil and got concerned. Something has to be up if he's going to call me twice in short succession while at work, right? So I call and leave a message saying when I'd be free to talk.

After lunch he calls again and I miss it since it was during class, so now I'm really wondering what is up because he called when I told him I wasn't free. This time, though he leaves a message. I play the message on speaker phone with my colleague. It was a very nervous plea of background classroom noises and lots of noises sounding similar to say... a phone rubbing up against a pant leg.

After school is over, I get a call from Samil "hey, what's up? You called earlier." I explain to him that he'd been calling me throughout the day and he found the whole situation to be amusing. One thing most Smart Phones have in common is the keyboard that requires a key lock on so that you don't pocket dial anyone. I told him about that, to which he said "Oh, yeah I forget about that sometimes."

This weekend I found out my Grandmother died. As I was packing up to leave, I realized that Samil still had not finished setting up the kitchen. No, that's not true. I knew he hadn't done it. I realized it was November all of a sudden and Samil had still not finished setting up the kitchen, and wasn't going to be home all weekend. So I called him to tell him he needed to do it. He responded with "well, it was a bigger task than what you did, and I've been really busy, and I've been wiping up in there, and that takes time." 1) It wasn't a bigger task (see previously linked post), and I also did everything in a week, he had a month. 2) I've been working 80 hours a week. How busy are you again? 3) Wiping up the kitchen after you cook is not special... its what you do after you cook. I do the same thing when I cook.

The next night I was at my Grandmother's wake. I get a phone call from Samil that I don't get a chance to pick up. Then I get another call. I excuse myself and call him back, but he didn't pick up. Then he calls again when I can't answer, so I quickly text him, "If you need anything, text me, I cna't pick up the phone while at the wake." Two minutes later, another call, which I was able to pick up because I wasn't talking to anyone at that moment, only to discover I was being pocket dialed again. The worst part... he never got the text message I sent because his phone's memory was full.