If the phone fits, wear it

Apparently the iPhone is dead and should rest in peace. That announcement was made by BlackBerry Chief Executive Thorsten Heins, who is bigging up his company's latest product, hoping for the salvation that may never come, unless it's in the form of China's Lenovo waving a big check and taking over the company.

The iPhone just isn't that smart any more, he reckons, because it doesn't allow the user to work on more than one tool at a time: "It's still the same. It is a sequential way to work and that's not what people want today anymore," he told the Associated Press agency. "They want multi-tasking."

Aside from the fact that Heins sounds a bit desperate at his remarkably shrinking brand (formerly called RIM), his pitch just seems out of step with the times. Since the BlackBerry was being waved around by CEOs and government types like a wand in the early noughties, a lot has happened.

When Steve Jobs put computers with call functions in our hands, he saw more clearly than anyone the world had changed. I didn't get it first. I wanted real buttons to press, but I'm over that and they seem kind of dirty now, with all that fluff they collect around the keyboard.

Some BlackBerry users at the time swore they would never go near a touch screen - and they're still out there. It may be typically noughty, but old habits die hard and some people reason that if a phone fits, stick with it. Hence, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, which is behind the Android platform, is still reportedly a BlackBerry Man.

We all know a "character" or two who sticks with their battered Sony Ericsson or Nokia, 10 years old and still going strong, they say, even if the companies that make them have dissolved or are teetering toward insolvency.

I would characterize the users of these phones as Non-Phone Types. They can afford something better, but actually they only have a mobile because they're a necessity (for others to contact them), and find no joy in the endless applications that smartphone companies develop to keep us addicted and buying new models.

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