The collected works of ScottyB

Otherwise referred to as ‘Dictionary’. What an evil little tool this is.

I’m not referring to the wonderful book that contains all the colourful words of our puzzling English language - rather the so-called ‘dictionary’ feature on my Nokia mobile phone.

While I’m usually a bit of a technology junkie, always testing and buying the latest gadgets when they become affordable, the whole world of mobile phones has completely flown past me. For years, I clung to my ancient Motorola ‘brick’. It did basically nothing and barely worked. It stayed in the car as an emergency device and had about $10 of call credit on it. It rarely left the glove compartment. When it did actually get use, the battery would get so hot after about a minute of talking, that you’d have to end the call anyway.

Eventually, it died. I wept for the loss of such a great icon. A revolutionary piece of emergency technology.

Sucking it up, I bought a Nokia 6-thousand and something… So keen on mobile phones I am - I don’t even know the model number of the phone I’ve owned now for at least 3 years.

This one gets a little more use; Due to the fact that it doesn’t burn your ear and hand off while it’s in use, I’m able to make the occasional phonecall and spend quite a significant amount of time texting.

Which brings us to the subject of my ramblings.

Up until a few weeks ago, I was a text, or SMS noob. Yes, yes, I’ll admit it - I would sit there for up to 5 minutes sometimes, forging a text message in a barrage of clicks and hammers of the keys. And it really was forging. I felt like I was in medieval times, with a flat hammer and chisel, carving my message into a piece of stone for the time it would take me to create an SMS message.

For this reason, my texts were short, to the point and generally only as informative as they need be - while also preserving the English language in its proper form (I detest ‘txt speak’ in all its guises). This meant that my world of SMS’ing was generally as quick as humanly possible, while also being quite cheap.

Then Katie turned my world upside down by showing me how to use predictive text. Why I’d never read the instructions, or even attempted the 2 minute learning curve, I’ll never know. But suddenly, I was composing text messages in a matter of seconds. And quickly, I was filling up the entire word requirement, getting more and more descriptive in my texting and carrying out complete, full sentences and even paragraphs within moments.

While this has saved an incredible amount of time, I now find myself running well into 2-part messages, and even 3-parts on occasion. The $30 call credit which used to last me over a month - sometimes two, is lasting me a few weeks if I’m lucky.

So like anything, predictive text has its pros and cons.

I did want a Nokia E70.. simply for the fact it has a full fold-out keyboard.

But now I’m not so sure this is a good idea.