They control the horizontal and the vertical

Join me as we take a journey in the darkest inner mind and . . . the outer limits.

So, I've been without a phone for a few weeks since I lost my iphone on the plane. While I secretly enjoyed being off the grid, off all the technological shackles I encumber myself with, the phone was arguably the most practical, and people were starting to complain it was impossible to reach me. So, impulsive consumer that I am, I decided to buy a new one.

I had publicly hemmed and hawed over the iphone 4 or the HTC evo 4g for a couple weeks, and when the moment finally came where I was irritated enough to just go get a phone, and decide on the evo, I find that it's sold out everywhere. And because I have OCD and have already been without a phone for a few weeks, I decide I can't wait until they have more in stock. Thus begins 24 hours (3 days ago) of OCD smartphone research. I literally could not do anything else outside of basic survival except figure out which phone I wanted, because I needed one now. But I've had bad phones before and refused to settle for a lemon. The iphone lost early on, because while the new iphone is probably the best overall piece of hardware on the market right now, I'm absolutely irritated with the iOS and the lack of basic functionality because steve jobs doesn't think it's ready yet.

So: to android! But which android phone? There are approximately a million. Luckily, there are approximately a million reviews of each of them. The lead contenders of course right now were the Droid incredible, the HTC evo (which we already know I can't find), and the Samsung Galaxy S series. I really, really like the HTC Sense UI, so I focused on that initially. But sprint doesn't have another HTC phone near as good as the evo, and I'll be damned if I sign up for the "death by a thousand micro-charges" model of verizon, so the incredible was out too. The samsung phones are actually pretty sharp, but I hate the UI and didn't want to have to spend days fiddling to get an HTC rip-off that I probably wouldn't be satisfied with. And then I stumbled across a review for the AT&T HTC Aria. I wouldn't have to change carriers and it's reviewed very well. Yes, the hardware specs pale in comparison to the evo, incredible and galaxy, but every single review went out of their way to point out how fast and smooth everything ran on the 600Mhz processor. Quibbles with AT&T bloatware aside, I decided on the Aria, about 22 hours after I had initially started researching it. After much more hemming and hawing and last minute guffawing and fondling of demo phones at Radio Shack (I had to have it NOW remember, so no mail order) I walked out (2 hours after I went in, it took half an hour just to ring me up. Thanks RAdio Shack!) with an HTC Aria and with 2 years more servitude to AT&T in my future.

I'm pleased with the purchase. It is indeed fast, more than fast for what I need a phone for, and it's light and sturdy and reasonably sized (it's not a brick in your pocket). And best of all it saved me $100 off of the latest and greatest thing that I don't really need because I already have an ipad for an ereader/portable movie viewer (although jailbroken because Apple refused to add crucial features or allow others to supply them). So I picked a phone that matches my needs and cost me less that I feel good about.

That was not the rant. That was just the story of shopping for a phone, with highlights on how much I need to get the OCD over things that don't really matter to me under control. The rant starts a little slowly, but goes like this:

In some versions of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he chronicles a world who's entire industry was slowly overrun by shoe stores, eventually killing them all and leaving only sedimentary layers filled with shoes for future archeologists to find and marvel over. If he'd written it a few years later, it would have been Starbucks stores, and if he wrote it today, it would be cell phone stores. In shopping for my cell phone it was really hard to escape the idea that we're batshit crazy over cell phones.

Whole and non-trivial portions of our population obsess with each new phone that's coming out, how it rates compared to the last, what the specs are, what's bad about it, what's great about it, why it proves your favorite company really IS worthy of your undying devotion, why it proves your favorite companies rival really IS satan's mechanical machine factory and just exactly how, each little pixel is going to make you sublimely happy. There are reviews from 5 to 10 major websites for each new phone that comes out, laying out the hardware in excruciating detail, how responsive the OS is, what features it has, how the benchmarks compare to other recent phones, why you should buy it, why you should hate it, how it completes you, how it will compare to the phone (quite literally) released next month that will probably be better. There's even a SEPARATE video review type for simply unboxing your phone, which I can only describe as technopornography. Is there any other reason to watch your favorite phone being unpackaged other than a perverse form of technolust? Do you really need a preview of how fucking opening your package is going to go? "Ooh yeah, slide it out. Take that wrapper off. Take it off. Oh, baby." Jesus.

It's a goddamn phone (and please keep in mind I'm yelling at me more than any of you). It will do the EXACT thing you need it to do, no matter which model you buy. It will take calls, it will get email, it will SMS, it will stream youtube. Who the fuck wants to spend their life obsessing over the phones that are out now and the phones that are on the horizon other than completely blinkered consumers? It's a labor saving device, it's supposed to free up your time so you can focus your life on more important things, not be the thing you focus your life on (which is really the whole essential sickness of consumer culture and corporate branding).

And don't even get me started on the complexity of the phone billing system. At what point does the amount of cognitive processing power needed to buy my phone and rate plan negate the gains in convenience provided by the phones features? At this point, I feel I could fairly quickly convince myself that I'd be better off not worrying about what type of phone I get at all. Next time I think I'm alotting myself ten minutes to the decision. Because it doesn't fucking matter.

And in the far future, as they dig down through the remains to our civilization and arrive at the sedimentary layers of the cell phone epoch (they will be able to tell because it will be comprised largely of petrified cell phones and shoes), they will find the remains of iphones and android phones, and write papers on what the choice of each phone must have meant for the people of the time. Just to piss me off.