spaceponies

I’ve had my Nexus One (the cur­rent google­phone) for a cou­ple of months now, and it's been enjoy­able. I bought it know­ing that it’d be a use­ful toy. Check­ing per­sonal email, work email and so on, except now in the sub­way sta­tion or on the train! Also, spi­der soli­taire any time I want. Outstanding.

Today I learned that it allows me to stick a pic­ture to a quar­ter of the screen, like a quarter-wallpaper. My emo­tional invest­ment in the phone just dou­bled, even though I know it’s silly. A smart­phone is a tiny touch­screen com­puter that can also make phone calls. But I can cus­tomize it, make it "mine" via pic­tures of my kids. And that mat­ters, even though I know it shouldn't. I know that this fea­ture is here for pre­cisely this pur­pose, but that under­stand­ing doesn't make me smile less when I see those pic­tures of my kids, sit­ting there like reverse-pop-up ads.

But ads for what? "Wow, they let me look at my beau­ti­ful kids/dog/car/whatever on this smart phone." I know that I could (prob­a­bly) take any other equiv­a­lent phone and do the same thing. But this phone is my phone, and my phone does all this stuff that I can’t afford to test on mul­ti­ple devices, because who buys mul­ti­ple smart phones? If I’m happy with the phone, why would I switch? So I enjoy my Nexus One a lit­tle more than I oth­er­wise would.

I’m guess­ing this hap­pens a lot.