ah, technology

[cellio]

This afternoon my (relatively-new) cell phone made a noise I hadn't heard before. (Kind of disturbing, actually; must try to fix.) When I investigated, I found a text message from a coworker reporting that his wife had just seen for sale (location given) something I had recently said I'd been having trouble finding. This prompted several immediate thoughts:

1. My plan does text messages?

2. How do people learn to type on those things? It took me at least a minute to compose my two-word reply. (Skipping punctuation would have been faster but out of character.) He sent a grammatically-correct paragraph without any cutesy IMisms. Granted, I don't know what device he used to send it.

3. Where did he get my phone number? (I can ask him that one tomorrow.) My land-line number is readily available, but I haven't given my cell number out to coworkers. I tried Googling for my own number and found sites willing to sell it to me but none willing to give it to me.

Heh. I learned some things today, and will learn one more tomorrow when I ask my coworker about #3. Meanwhile, purchase mission accomplished thanks to this message.

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

I have seen some people who text regularly get frighteningly high rates of input speed with cellphones that only have the normal phone keypad. That being said, there are an increasing number of cellphones that incorporate small keyboards (of the sort you'd see on a higher-end blackberry, although they're finding ways to make them slightly larger on the latest models by having them fold out) and the folks in my office who text or email regularly from the road all seem to be moving that direction.

[cellio]

Good point; I saw several phones with keyboards when I went shopping. I didn't look closely at them because the phones were all too large for a pocket, the keys looked tiny for my big fingers, and I just sent my first-ever text message from a phone. (Do those phones come with a stylus, or do people really manage to type on those itty bitty keys?)