My work has been changing how they manage 
cell phones recently and they're doing away 
with Blackberries. So I had to give mine up 
and with my tail between my legs accept the 
new standard offering: an iPhone...

As a long time Blackberry user, my first 
thoughts were of course about the 
awkwardness of using the touchscreen 
keyboard rather than the old physical 
keyboard.  While it's not unusably hard, I 
can't imagine myself ever achieving more 
than 50% of the typing speed I was 
achieving on the Blackberry.  I used to put 
out long, well revised emails on the 
Blackberry.  Now I imagine I'll always 
prefer to wait until I get back to my desk 
before writing long emails.  I will be 
limited to short responses of "ok", "yes", 
"no", or "will call you". 

This strikes me as one more example of the 
tech world's movement towards users as 
consumers of content rather than producers.  
With my Blackberry, I was a producer. With 
my new iPhone, I won't be writing any more 
long well thought out documents when I have 
some free time.  Instead, I'll probably 
consume some news or maybe some Youtube 
videos.

I should probably be more proactive about 
my response, and maybe swing the pendulum 
back even further by carrying pen and paper 
with me.

This has been a rant.  They may take my 
Blackberry away and replace it with a candy 
phone, but they'll never pry my Ubuntu 
laptop from me!