Ignorant Historian

I’ve been waiting for today for a long time.  Today’s the day when I got to switch my phone service BACK to Verizon (for those who are keeping count, this is now my 3rd switch in 4 years).

Though I’m not much of a phone talker, it’s a bit frusterating to have to stand in one place in my apartment to have a conversation, and even then it can cut out on you.  Every time I switch providers, it’s to get better service in my apartment, and then something happens within a few months, and it’s no longer the best provider for my apartment (a cell tower is taken down, a fire happens and we have to move…).

But this switch (and quite the upgrade to a better phone), has me thinking of how much phones have improved in a relatively short amount of time.  I received my first cell phone for my 19th birthday (I actually went a whole semester of college without a cell phone…that would have been weird even a couple of years later!).  That first phone was one of these (because really, what other phone was there to have?):I thought it was so cool, with my 100 minutes/month, in Kansas/Oklahoma/Missouri/Illinois only (yeah, I don’t get why those 4 states were in a  regional plan together, either).

A couple of years later, I upgraded to a flip phone, because of course that was cool.  Then to a color flip phone, and then to a flip phone with camera.

And now, I have the enV Touch, with touch screen, flash camera, and QWERTY keyboard.  (sorry, no picture, but it’s a little difficult to take a picture of a phone when the camera’s IN the phone!) These were three things that would have seemed so crazy back in 2001 when I got that first phone.  Makes me wonder what phones will look like in another 8 years!

What futuristic features would you like to see phones have?

I know that I don’t have the largest vocabulary in the world, but I would like to think I have a reasonable grasp on English vocabulary. I’m sure this is helped by the hour or two I spend reading every day and the fact that I often read classics.

However, this apparently is not the norm of the American people, or at least the people that use the same model of phone I use. Only occasionally do I find a word that Blogger doesn’t know, and even less common do I find a word that Microsoft Word spell check doesn’t know (it especially happens when writing seminary papers…clearly Word has never been to seminary), but I find words that my phone doesn’t know (specifically the T9 predictive text function) on almost a daily basis.

Words that I’ve recently discovered were not in my phone’s vocabulary:

Bawl
Yeppers (I said I had an extensive vocabulary, haha)
Roomie (Blogger doesn’t recognize this nor “yeppers,” sigh)
Blog (I know!)

Another question about the T9 function: it’s supposed to give me the words in the order of most frequent use, right? How come when I go to type “jen” (a word I have to use pretty often) does it give me “ken” and “leo” before “jen?” Aren’t there like 40 bazillion Jens out there, many more than Kens or Leos? I mean really, I only “know” one Leo, and that’s only if you can count famous people.

What words have you been surprised is not in your phone/blogger/word processor?