End Notes
The Lives of My Cells
Musings on my phones.
By Charles R. Meyer, M.D.
I’m on the edge. I’m about to buy an iPhone. I’ve succumbed to the hype now that Verizon has cracked the AT&T monopoly. I’m not sure I really need the iPhone; but then I’m not sure how many of the trash-bin full of the latest cell phones that I’ve owned I’ve needed. All of them, starting with the Motorola car phone mounted on the dashboard of my VW Vanagon, made and received calls. The rest of their features have been icing. Well, maybe more than icing.
Each stage in the evolution of cell phones has brought a measure of added convenience. In the years BC (before cell phones), I would get a page on my digital pager and, if I was away from home or the hospital, would have to find that now- vanishing species, a payphone, to answer it. Payphones were frequently outside, and I’d hope that I could get by with only one call and one quarter. The Motorola allowed me to call from the Vanagon, but I was yoked to the car.
My next cell phone, a Motorola 3200 I fondly dubbed “the brick,” no longer required the car antenna. But carrying around a brick of a phone with a six-inch antenna was embarrassing. These were the formative years of cell phones, before their price plummeted to almost nothing and before 80 percent of the people walking down the street were talking on them. When I talked on my brick in public, heads turned, people scowled, and the implied message was, “You are a rude, rich SOB who should take his expensive gadget elsewhere.” I tried to keep my calls short and make them inconspicuously.
The usage fees were another reason to keep calls short in those days. Package rates with more monthly minutes than any nonmanic person could use hadn’t arrived. You were charged for all the minutes and even fractions of minutes you used, and you were charged more for daytime minutes than nighttime ones. I would wait until I got home or to the office before returning pages from patients I knew to be loquacious in order to conserve minutes and dollars.
As cell phones shrank, I abandoned the brick for a Motorola flip phone. This was a Neanderthal precursor to today’s flip phones. It had a “small” battery, so it fit in a pants pocket. But the obvious bulge it made made it look like you had a good-sized sarcoma in your thigh. The brick’s rapier-like antenna was replaced by a retractable wire one. But that ponderous flip phone was a battery hog, quickly requiring me to switch to a fatter battery to truly make it effective. Reception was spotty even with the antenna extended, so “Can you hear me now?” was an almost regular part of conversation during calls. Like all of my previous phones, it was just a phone—call in, call out.
That changed with my next phone, a light-weight, pocket-sized flip phone with a wafer-sized battery and retractable antenna. With this phone, came the era of the phone as entertainment. You could take pictures and view, store, and send them. Ring tones became a personal statement, and many people changed them as often as they did their hair color. They introduced texting, now a national pastime second only to baseball, although you had to press numeric keys multiple times to select the right letter. The flip phone’s added conveniences were small steps forward—caller ID, a better and larger contact database, and the ability to call a highlighted telephone number in a text message.
My current Blackberry, with its larger screen, alphanumeric keyboard, email access, and Internet availability, was a giant step forward from the flip phone. I threw away my PDR when I put Epocrates on my Blackberry. I threw away my pager and started receiving pages as text messages (some of my more tech-savvy partners even send me text messages about patients they have admitted during the night). I didn’t throw away my computer, but the Blackberry frequently is my preferred device for Google searches.
But now I realize my Blackberry is starting to seem old. Because of the limitations of its browser, I’m not able to perform tasks such as looking up my hospital patient list. And Internet access seems slow. And the device is starting to suddenly reboot for no reason. And … The Blackberry is OK, but it’s not cool like the iPhone. I know typing on the iPhone won’t be as fast as typing on my Blackberry, and I’ve read the complaints about dropped calls if you hold the phone the wrong way. But I can put up with that just to get that screen … that browser … those apps.
I’m on my way to the Verizon store right now. MM
Charles Meyer is a practicing internist and editor in chief of Minnesota Medicine.