Community. We all crave it. We want to belong. Be understood. Be supported. Receive solid app recommendations.
What? Did you think I was talking about a deep emotional issue here? Well, I kinda am. This girl is very emotional about her smartphone!
Once upon a time, I had a phone that just made phone calls. Then my brothers insisted that I use it to send text messages. I hated typing with a phone keyboard. Everyone around me had a Blackberry. They had email and QWERTY keyboards don't you know. Pretty fancy! In March of 2009 I joined the world of smartphones with a pink Blackberry Curve. Oh how I loved that thing! I felt so DC.
This was my NKOTB era as well. All the Blockheads had BBs to keep up on Twitter at all times. Twitter was our clubhouse, our hangout, our community. My BB kept that community within reach day and night. BBs were part of our culture.
Then my brother started talking about his fancy new Android phone. It did lots of fun things. It could even use the internet in an actually USEFUL way! With Flash and everything. Email and QWERTY weren't enough for me anymore. I wanted the full internet experience! Silly as it sounds, being in the BH community made it hard for me to leave BB, but I decided to make the change. Enter the Droid 2 Global by Motorola in November of 2010.
Now, you could tweet just as well on a droid as on a BB. And soon, as the twitter apps improved, you could tweet even better! And the pretty shiny WWW was so nice to have at my fingertips. I bonded with my brother and a few friends over the wonderful world of android. I grew to love and rely on Google Navigation to get me around the incredibly huge "town" called the Greater DC area. Google and I are besties. I give Google all my email, contact and calendar info and in exchange I get all my info on the go and fully integrated.
But you know what I've discovered? The iPhone people out there have a pretty tight knit community going on. Because every phone is like the other, everyone has a phone that works just like their friend's phone. Not a lot of customization in models or anything else. I used to think this was a negative. But I'm also realizing that I'm not as big a geek as I wish I was and I don't really make use of the android customization options.
If you took a survey of my closest friends, you'll see all sorts of phones. The ones that just make phone calls and all three main types of smartphones. But the percentage with iPhones just keep growing. I even know someone who switched from android to iPhone. (SHOCK. HORROR. DISMAY.)
Community is a very powerful thing. When I'm eligible for an upgrade this summer, community will be part of my consideration. I'll consider screen size and processors and LTE networks, but I'm also going to consider the people around me who make my life rich and focused. Because even my technology touches my heart.
