Blackberry Craze

‘Why didn’t you buy a blackberry? Why didn’t you buy a blackberry?’ Everyone keeps asking me, when they see my Nokia E63 phone. To say that I have been asked this question over 100 times is not an understatement. There’s this expectation everywhere in Lagos now that, once you need a new phone and can afford an expensive one, then you should go for a blackberry.

I am of the opinion that the place where people abuse this device most is the church. Can you imagine that one day, while I was sitting in church during a service, two people, one on my left and another on my right suddenly brought their blackberry and started using it right in the middle of the sermon. Guess what they were doing: yeah, you guessed right, facebooking and chatting. I was really pissed off. So many had been flashing blackberries in my face for a long time and I can’t even escape into my comfort zone while in church? People even put it as their facebook status, ‘facebooking in church’ or something similar to that, it is really shameless.

I was impressed during cross over service when the guy beside me brought out his blackberry and started taking sermon notes. Though I thought it unnecessary but at least, he was not using it to check facebook notifications. It seemed really funny to me because the people that were using pen and paper were faster and more effective than him. Before he concludes a sentence on point on his blackberry, the pastor would have reeled in about 5 more points. I also wondered why in the past, I never saw people take sermon notes with their Sagem, Trium, Nokia 3310… or Nokia N70, even though these phones have the facility to do that.

The truth is that blackberry was created mainly for business purposes, especially for business and career people who are always on the go but must always have access to their clients and mails all the time. But what do we have now? Every Tom, Dick and Harry uses a blackberry, whether they need it or not, even some youths that do not have enough money to cater for themselves must have that blackberry. To say blackberry has snatched the Nokia market in Lagos would be an understatement. The blackberry that the western worlds have used in the past and wasn’t a big deal to them has hit us and we are still trying to find our balance.

Also, have you also noticed that people that use blackberry don’t refer to it as ‘my phone’ but as ‘my blackberry? Or is it not a phone anymore? Madness!