{"id":997,"date":"2007-11-06T17:06:06","date_gmt":"2007-11-07T01:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/archives\/2007\/11\/06\/berry-love\/"},"modified":"2007-11-06T17:06:06","modified_gmt":"2007-11-07T01:06:06","slug":"berry-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2007\/11\/06\/berry-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Berry Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;m sitting in the waiting room at the House Ear Clinic reading &quot;Men&#8217;s Journal&quot; and I come across a BlackBerry ad featuring Terry McBride.<\/p>\n<p>A few months back, I saw one featuring John Mayer.<\/p>\n<p>Why do we hate John Mayer? Is it the overemoting? Or the ridiculous tattoos? Or the Jessica Simpson fixation? Oh, I remember why, it&#8217;s the incredibly wimpy MUSIC! It&#8217;s the calculation that bugs me. If you&#8217;re a blues-rocker, why didn&#8217;t you START OFF as a blues-rocker? Seems to me you followed the market. Didn&#8217;t do anything new, didn&#8217;t open my eyes, just gave me more of what I already knew. Unlike my BlackBerry.<\/p>\n<p>When did you know you needed mobile e-mail?<\/p>\n<p>Maybe you still don&#8217;t know. Maybe you live in China, where e-mail has been supplanted by texting (should I say &quot;txting&quot;?) But, if you&#8217;re a businessman. Or a housewife. If your idea of communicating is more than a few cryptic semi-words, you need mobile e-mail. And the device of choice, the only one that truly works, is the BlackBerry.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, I know you love your iPhone. But, you don&#8217;t get push e-mail of corporate accounts, not in any authorized fashion. And we need our e-mail INSTANTLY! As for those using the ridiculous Treo, hopefully this missive will convince you to trash it. Did you read that expose on the <a title=\"The Case of the Subpar Smartphone\" href=\"http:\/\/select.nytimes.com\/2007\/09\/08\/business\/08nocera.html?_r=1&#038;oref=slogin\" target=\"_blank\">Treo in the &quot;New York Times<\/a>&quot;? The Treo is the OPPOSITE of twenty first century tech. It just doesn&#8217;t work. It crashes. The OS is positively ancient. And the e-mail isn&#8217;t instantaneous. Oh, Verizon supposedly has a workaround, but who&#8217;d even bother to try.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of Verizon, can you hear me now? If you&#8217;re on T-Mobile, I know you&#8217;re cheap. Yup, you. You can&#8217;t resist a bargain. You want all those minutes for no money. It&#8217;s just that I can&#8217;t HEAR YOU! Because you&#8217;re in one of the many dead zones the company ADMITS it has.<\/p>\n<p>Or maybe you&#8217;re on Sprint. Same technology as Verizon, CDMA, but with a lot fewer towers. You may not have gotten the memo, but others have. Sprint is hemorrhaging customers.<\/p>\n<p>And if you&#8217;re on AT&amp;T&#8230; AT&amp;T hasn&#8217;t been reliable since the eighties.<\/p>\n<p>You need Verizon because you&#8217;re a BUSINESSPERSON! You need a CONNECTION!<\/p>\n<p>Of course, you can&#8217;t travel with Verizon, because the rest of the world is on GSM, but that&#8217;s why you&#8217;ve got the BlackBerry 8830, which works on BOTH networks (albeit at a ridiculously high price, since you can&#8217;t replace the SIM card).<\/p>\n<p>And that brings us right back where we started. It&#8217;s about efficiency. It&#8217;s about making your life easier. It&#8217;s about being WOWED by technology.<\/p>\n<p>When you set up your BlackBerry account and e-mail starts flowing to the device you can&#8217;t believe it. It&#8217;s too good to be true! How does it work!<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re freed from your office. You feel grounded. And you&#8217;re suddenly pissed EVERYBODY ELSE DOESN&#8217;T HAVE A BLACKBERRY!<\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t have a BlackBerry you just don&#8217;t get it. But owners do.<\/p>\n<p>Like Terry McBride.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m against endorsements. Even though idiots like Mr. Mayer think they&#8217;re a way of life, that you HAVE to take the money, like it&#8217;s a drug. I thought it was ridiculous when every star did a Gap ad. When was Gap cool? But I can understand endorsing the BlackBerry. Because the BlackBerry is everything the music used to be. Something you can&#8217;t foresee that makes your life so much RICHER!<\/p>\n<p>Too much music is now entertainment. It doesn&#8217;t surprise, it doesn&#8217;t elate. I remember hearing &quot;Sexual Healing&quot; on the radio the first time. I had to push the buttons, in a desperate effort to hear it again. The last time I heard a track like this was Gnarls Barkley&#8217;s &quot;Crazy&quot;. Since then?<\/p>\n<p>The BlackBerry found an UNFORESEEN NEED and filled it. This is like showing up at the record company with a demo NOTHING LIKE what&#8217;s on the radio and saying THIS IS GONNA BE REALLY BIG! But the label doesn&#8217;t want stuff like that, it wants shit just like what&#8217;s already on the radio. And use a name while you&#8217;re at it, WILL YOU!<\/p>\n<p>BlackBerry wasn&#8217;t part of Microsoft&#8230; RIM was north of the border, in Canada&#8230; They were doing this ALONE!<\/p>\n<p>And, like a developing act, my 8830 is nothing like those original black clunkmeisters. And if I see anybody with one of these originals, or its blue plastic replacement, I laugh. It&#8217;s like seeing someone on an airplane with a CD booklet. What, you can&#8217;t afford the future?<\/p>\n<p>The BlackBerry isn&#8217;t priced like a Ferrari. It&#8217;s not prohibitively expensive.<\/p>\n<p>But interestingly, the money&#8217;s not in the device, but the service. The extra forty bucks a month for data. You&#8217;d think the labels would learn this, that the music is just the tip of the iceberg. Oh yeah, they want in on touring and merch, but they don&#8217;t want to readjust their DEAL! Give me 50 percent and I&#8217;ll sign that contract&#8230;otherwise I&#8217;ll go it alone.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d like to say the BlackBerry menus are as good as the iPhone&#8217;s. I&#8217;d like to say its usability rivals a Mac&#8217;s. But this isn&#8217;t so. Maybe, in the future, I&#8217;ll be using an Apple device, on Verizon. But for now, I&#8217;m part of the Berry team. Along with Terry, John Mayer and that housewife at the ball game.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, I&#8217;m not thumbing constantly. But no matter where I am in the world, I&#8217;m in touch.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m excited about this.<\/p>\n<p>We need to be excited. We need to be thrilled. The money comes AFTER THIS!<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;m sitting in the waiting room at the House Ear Clinic reading &quot;Men&#8217;s Journal&quot; and I come across a BlackBerry ad featuring Terry McBride. A few months back, I saw one featuring John Mayer. Why do we hate John Mayer? Is it the overemoting? Or the ridiculous tattoos? Or the Jessica Simpson fixation? Oh, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-g5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/997\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}