5 ways to figure out what kind of phone they have

Ever find yourself frustrated why one friend will text everything, not even picking up the phone when it's in her face, and another friend will only write you back over email?  Even your closest friends you thought you knew so well can completely baffle you with their mobile habits.

Over the past few months, we have developed a foolproof system for figuring out what kind of device that person on the other end is using to call/text/email you.


So, whatcha talkin' on, Willis?

1. Texts and email errors have you worried they have a substance abuse problem (iPhone)
2. Their texts have often been mistaken for a novel (Droid)
3. They email or text videos and pictures more than actual words (iPhone)
4. Even a call or text is returned with an email (Blackberry)
5. They tell their friends, mother and doorman about their phone (iPhone)

and finally....

Their voicemail asks people to leave a return number (land line dinosaur)

Rabbit, Rabbit

gmail.com/motion

Cute, Google.  Very cute.

A team of Googlers demonstrating how to create a pie chart

Our personal favorite is the young lady demonstrating her "uploading" capabilities in an image.  Play around with these links and you'll see what we mean.

More Than Just A Laugh

There's a popular article from Thursday's New York Times making the rounds called "Don't Call Me, I Won't Call You".

This sounds shockingly similar to the article we posted on February 5th titled, "Are Phones Becoming Obsolete?".  While they may have one-upped us on the title, we're seeing a trend here.

This feels eerily similar to the time we made an early statement of hot Snuggie sales before AdAge declared them a winner.

You can fill in your own last line here.  You know where this is going.

Are Phones Becoming Obsolete?

The other day we checked our voicemail and got an urgent request from Big Boy.  Unfortunately, the message was a few days old and the opportunity to help someone out had long since passed.

Without thinking Poker Chick called him, and told him if something was urgent in the future to email if he didn't get her on the phone.  He replied that someone else told them to do that ("the kids are all on email this day, no one uses the phone...") but he couldn't comprehend that there was a more urgent way to reach someone than the phone.

At that moment it dawned on us: are phones becoming obsolete?  After all, we didn't even blink after ignoring our voicemail for days.  Between texts, emails, etc. are phones even necessary anymore?  And before you stop to say that's ridiculous, do you really want us to believe you can't think of one single occasion in the past few months when someone called and you thought to yourself "that's weird, why are they calling me?"

Face it, phones are going the way of face time -- gone.  It won't be long before they're barely used at all - between facebook, foursquare, text, tweets - phones won't be needed anymore.  We're in the midst of a huge cultural shift, peeps.  As big as the one where people finally realized telegrams would become relics.

Pause ranting prediction to insert moment of hypocrisy:

This moment of hypocrisy sponsored by "The Hallelujah Chorus"

Right now, somewhere near the city of Shenzhen, China, is an iPhone with our name on it.  That's right, Poker Chick was one of the first Verizon customers to have purchased an iPhone and now it's on the way.  Is she excited? In a way she is, in a way she embarrassingly is.

Wait, what gives?  We started writing this post a couple of weeks ago, then a few days later found ourselves waking up at 3am to buy - you guessed it - a telephone.

So it might seem a bit strange when we continue to assert our prediction that soon phones will be obsolete.  Except for accepting food deliveries in a doorman building, they no longer serve a real useful purpsose.

Still don't agree?  Look at it this way.  From the day we get our iPhone, we will no longer have a phone.  We will have a mobile device.  And the bill to prove it.

Poker Chick 2.0

With the Dell on its last legs, it was time to purchase a new notebook. So we just walked into a store today and bought one. That's right. We're stunned too.