Droid®

Yesterday (Thursday, August 12, 2010) I visited my hairdresser for a trim.
After the usual perfunctory yammering, his cellphone rang.
He stroked an icon on its display, and began talking into his tiny BlueTooth headset.
Well yeah, I could do that myself, but -a) my phone rings infrequently, and -b) as my younger brother-in-Boston says, I don’t want a cricket in my ear.
My hairdresser’s cellphone is a Verizon Motorola Droid® (at left).
Call ended, he stroked off, and I picked it up.
“Tell me about this thing,” I said.
“It’s really cool,” he said. “It’s saving me time and money.”
Thus began my introduction to the fantabulous Motorola Droid.
He has 89 bazilyun apps on it, all of which are displayed as icons on a miniature iPad-like screen.
You scroll through it the same way you scroll an iPad, with finger swipes.
“Here, look at this,” he said.
He showed me some app that had all his Shoppers’ Club discount barcodes.
Great idea; every Shoppers’ Club barcode displays.
“I had a wallet overstuffed with Shoppers’ Club cards. Everything is on this phone. All they hafta do is scan it.”
“Yeah, but I only have three keytags on my keys.”
“Every store has a Shoppers’ Club. Doncha shop B.J.’s?”
“No.”
“You don’t shop B.J.’s?”
“Here we go with the Sam’s Club/B.J.’s bit. I don’t need 89 tons of bulk rice.
Nor do I need 22 boxes of Cocoa Puffs. —The last ones will be rotten by the time I get to them.
I ain’t stockin’ up for Armageddon.
Show me more.”
I took out my own cellphone, a simple Verizon Nokia 6205.
“To me this is just a phone,” I said. “I ain’t usin’ it to start my dinner from across the universe.
I have a few apps on it, one of which is VZ Navigator.
But I don’t use it as a navigation system. All I got it for is it would tell me the exact geodesic coordinates of where I was holding it.”
“But VZ Navigator is a great app!” he said.
“Not for me,” I said.
“VZ Navigator is nice, but what I do is print off a series of Google-maps, and follow them. I ain’t havin’ some disembodied voice tell me to turn at the next fast-approaching intersection. I need to know where I’m going before I leave the garage.”
“Here, watch this,” he said.
He spoke an address into his phone, and in a few seconds it came up with a step-by-step route.
“Take Monroe St. west from Honeoye (‘HONE-eee-oy;' rhymes with 'boy') Falls.....”
“Yeah, I did that last week, got as far as the Honeoye Falls Veterinary, and discovered a bridge was out.
Does your phone tell ya that?” I asked.
“Yes, it does,” he responded.
“‘Follow posted detour’ the flashing sign said. That posted detour was on the other side of the bridge.”
“This thing is faster than my laptop. I can get my e-mail in seconds.”
He stroked an icon, and his e-mail displayed.
“Have ya ever seen anything this fast?”
“Yeah, my laptop at home,” I said.
“Firing up my e-mail is just about instantaneous, and it might take five seconds to download my e-mail from the poPserver.
Pardon me for being an old fogey,” I finally said; “but I have to have function over magic.”
“I happened to hit a garage-sale the other day, and they had a garbage-disposal for $25.
Well, what do I know about garbage-disposals? But it had a barcode.
So I took a picture of the barcode, and let my Goggle® app research it.
$100 new at Lowes. So I bought it.”
“It’ll look nice in your closet,” I thought. (Of course that’s not fair. He may have immediate use for it, whereas I don’t.)
TWANG-TWANG-TWANG!
He had some guitar app displaying in his cellphone, and was strumming the virtual strings.
“Well, I might just hafta hit my Verizon store, but the iPad crashed because it wasn’t a computer.”
I’m hoping he’ll let me try it.

• “Honeoye Falls” is the nearest village to the west to where we live in western New York, a rural village about five miles away. (The hairdresser is within it.)
• “Goggle,” not “Google.” It scans and then researches.