BlackBerry Tour 9630

•1 November 2009 • Leave a Comment

I didn’t really need to change phones.  My BlackBerry Curve 8330 was a very good phone, with excellent battery life (especially for a smartphone) and was able to perform most of the functions I wanted — reasonably fast web access, easy-to-use messaging, instant messaging, and so on.  But I must admit, when the BlackBerry Tour 9630 came out, I was green with envy.

Many have compared the Tour to being much like a cross between the newest BlackBerry Curve 8900 to come out for AT&T, as well as the older but much heralded BlackBerry Bold 9000.  The body style of the former, the keyboard of the latter.  The best of both worlds, one might say.

For Alltel, which has neither the Curve 8900 nor the Bold, I saw the Tour as a beefier, more impressive version of the phone I already owned and loved, the Curve 8330.

The Tour has a 3.2MP camera with autofocus, compared to my old Curve’s 2.0MP camera sans autofocus, as well as the 3.1Mbps EVDO rev.A antenna vs. the 2.4Mbps EVDO rev.0 antenna that’s in the Curve.  (This translates to modestly faster browsing, but much, much faster uploading — up to ten times faster.  This is especially nice considering the proportionally larger photos achieved with a 3.2MP camera vs. the older 2.0MP camera found in the rev.0 Curve.)

The screen is also immeasurably nicer.  The Tour has a beautiful, bright screen at 480×360 compared to the Curve’s 320×240.  The result is a much more refined, sharper looking image with greater contrast and better backlighting, making the Tour considerably easier to use in sunlight.  (Further, the Curve has a sort of double screen, with the LCD below a higher-positioned piece of plastic, which gives it the unfortunate appearance of a concave display found in older televisions.  The Tour’s screen is perfectly flat and without another piece of plastic to obfuscate the image, which makes it look a heck of a lot better.  The only caveat is that I think the Curve’s internal screen was well protected by that extra shell, whereas the Tour’s screen is right there, ready to take the brunt of any impact we all hope never happens.)

Another interesting note is that the Tour contains a SIM card slot for global roaming.  This is a nice addition, though I’m unlikely to use it.  What’s more important to me, however, is the fact that the SD card slot is directly accessible beneath the battery door, whereas the Curve’s SD card slot was positioned beneath the battery.  As any BlackBerry owner knows, a battery pull is fairly painful, given how long the device takes starting up cold like that.  That’s not a problem on the Tour.

Lastly, the Curve 8330 runs OS 4.5, compared to the Tour’s 4.7.  While a couple of “dot” releases seems inconsequential, the UI tweaks and facelift are pretty significant.  The newer interface is a lot sleeker, making great use of the Tour’s ability to display blacks so well, making it very elegant and professional-looking.  The 4.5 OS looks cartoonish when placed head-to-head with 4.7.  Also, there have been many sensible changes, including renaming a few items in the OS to make them easier to find, as well as adding the super-useful app switching ability to the BlackBerry menu key.  (Simply hold the key down for a moment, and a row of all your open applications will appear, superimposed over whatever you have opened.  Much, much easier than the old method.)*

Is this critical?  Probably not.  But the same could be said of all the refinements I’ve outlined so far.  So while the Curve was still a perfectly great phone, doing almost everything I needed, I still upgraded to the Tour — because I’m a bit of a gadget hound, and I can’t help myself.  What can I say?

In any case, I’m of the personal opinion that the BlackBerry Tour is the best CDMA phone that RIM has produced, above the Storm even.  I haven’t used the new Storm2, which I’m sure is beautiful.  But truth be told, if I were going to buy a touchscreen phone, it would be Apple’s iPhone (which will probably come true at some point down the line.  I’m not currently in a position to do so because AT&T is not present in Montana, and I’m a bit nervous about GSM carrier’s 3G coverage).  There are handsets on the horizon that look exciting (including models that abandon the trackball in favor of a trackpad to eliminate the moving part), but those look targeted towards GSM carriers for the time being.  RIM can hardly be bothered to produce more than a couple CDMA phones per year, so we’ve reached our quota for now.

Now, I’ve quoted a lot of improved features and stats, but how do I feel about it in the context of simply being my everyday phone?  Well, I like it a lot.  I feel the same way I did about this new phone as I did when I first bought the Curve — it’s a fun toy, and I find myself tinkering with it all the time.  Battery life seems comparable, audio quality maybe slightly better, but overall, it’s a super phone.  Anyone looking at buying a BlackBerry should consider this one if that person is with a CDMA provider (Verizon, Sprint, or Alltel) — otherwise, I would look at the upcoming BlackBerry Bold 9700, which seems to have many of the same great features as the Tour, except with WiFi added.  (CDMA smartphones with added WiFi seem to be rare, with HTC and Palm contributing a couple of exceptions.)

The Tour is obviously more expensive than the older Curve ($150 compared to $50, after rebate with Alltel), but my strong feeling is that if you’re going to go big, go as big as you can.  Let’s face it, the BlackBerry is a bit of a status item anyway, so dazzle away with the extra beauty and added functionality.

*I heard word that new 5.0 OS will actually work on both the Tour and older Curve, which will eventually render my point about the UI moot.  I’m curious to see whether the Curve’s older processor will play well with the added visual effects.

UPDATE (November 4, 2009):

I purchased the BlackBerry Tour Charging Pod to go with this new phone.  Aside from being slightly more convenient than fiddling around with the micro-USB cable for charging, it does indeed appear that the pod charges much faster than going in through the normal charging port.  (The pod makes use of the contacts on the back of the phone for more power transfer.)  For $10, it’s not a bad investment.

Mac OS X – Snow Leopard

•26 August 2009 • Leave a Comment

I’ve been seeing some hate today from random tech writers about the next version of the Macintosh operating system (10.6) — namely from PCWorld and BusinessWorld, who may or may not have an axe to grind.

Each’s main point is that the new OS doesn’t add any functionality and thus isn’t worth the update.  (For the record, a single license costs $29 for existing 10.5 users.)

I think these reviewers are missing the point of this upgrade.  Apple, in perhaps the most mature move I’ve ever seen from a software development team, decided to go back to their existing code and just improve it.  That means making it leaner, faster, and more stable all around.  Take for example the Finder, the most basic and perhaps important application on the Mac.  It’s like the Windows Explorer in that it deals with your files and folders and connecting to servers, etc.  It’s been completely rewritten — but it looks exactly the same as before.  What Apple has done is update it to Cocoa, their main API framework in Mac OS X, which means it’ll now be multi-threaded and way more stable than it ever was.  (Apple had ported the previous Finder over from Mac OS 9, so it had an insanely large amount of legacy code in it.  That’s all gone now.)

Most other releases of OS X (or Windows, for that matter) has made a big deal out of showcasing new, marquee features to justify their existence.  Leopard, for example, brought Time Machine, Stacks, and a sleeker UI.  But there’s a phenomena in software called ‘feature creep,’ which describes the continual bloating and slowdown associated with adding extra layers of software to an existing product.

Windows Vista, in my mind, is the epitome of this phenomena.  Now, I’m not going to rail on Microsoft here, but most people feel strongly that the Vista release wasn’t handled well.  Windows 7 looks to remedy this, but as far as I can tell, this new Windows only serves to tweak the interface a little and fixing some bugs.

Now this is fine, since I’m behind Apple for taking a similar move with Snow Leopard.  That said, the upgrade cost is vastly higher for Windows 7, as though it were a completely original release.  It’s not.

In fact, I’d wager that there were more significant architectural changes in Snow Leopard than there were in Windows 7.  (For example, Windows 7 is described as being way friendlier with compatibility than Vista was at launch.  But this is merely a side effect of them not having changed much from Vista to 7 — so, any software or hardware released in the last few years should work.  Coincidental.)

Apple has moved most of their frameworks and bundled applications to 64-bit, which is an enormous and massive undertaking.  I was amused when I read the PCWorld reviewer say that he’s been happily using 64-bit Windows for years, and that Apple is late to the party.  (This is outrageous.  Apple has had a lot of hybrid 32/64-bit support for many years now, and has never needed to distinguish between multiple OSes as Microsoft has.  With Windows, you either choose one or the other, and if a piece of software or a driver hasn’t been updated to 64-bit, you CANNOT use it.  That simple.  This is not a problem on the Mac OS.)  But this reviewer is in a small minority — many users will find 64-bit Windows 7 unusable because of legacy hardware and applications.

Now, besides the aforementioned refinements, what Apple has also done is create a couple of new frameworks that will forever change computing on the Mac OS.  The operative word here is “will,” since most software won’t take advantage of this just yet, but the future is bright because of the following:

OpenCL – Open Computing Language will present programmers with an interface to access the power of a computer’s graphical processing unit (GPU).  Right now, the GPU often sits there mostly unused, which is a shame since it’s so powerful.  An example of an immediate change that will occur due to OpenCL is that H.264 viewing will be GPU accelerated and use significantly less CPU as a result.  (H.264 is the principal encoder used on high-definition footage.  If you download a music video or rent a movie from iTunes, for example, it’s H.264 encoded.)  Many applications will leverage this in the future, and we could witness dramatic speed increases (and overall efficiency improvements) in many applications, from photo and video editors to games.  Yes, I said games.  They do exist on the Mac platform.

Grand Central Dispatch – There isn’t a Mac sold today that doesn’t possess two or more CPU cores.  However, neither the Mac OS nor Windows currently does much to take advantage of the extra processing power because it’s very difficult to take advantage.  Right now, a programmer has to write lines of code that manually ‘thread’ to each core (that is, assign tasks between each core).  This is insanely difficult because of issues like timing, which is essential when you’re waiting to execute the next instruction set.  Grand Central will act like a dispatcher for applications themselves and not require the programmer to undergo these manual adjustments.  GCD will assign different tasks (or calls) to different processors, depending on load and availability.  As I understand it, programmers still need to make their applications ‘aware’ of GCD, but as they do, we should see marked improvements in speed.

The technology of Snow Leopard is best described by Apple itself:  http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/

So when Snow Leopard releases this Friday, what we have for the new OS is further fit and finish and some added technologies that may be way more important than any feature addition yet seen.  To me, the cost of entry is well worth it.  I went ahead and bought the Family 5-Pack for $49, making each computer upgrade a mere $9.80.  What I get in return is an even better version of the world’s most advanced consumer operating system.

mStand and Apple Wired Keyboard

•25 July 2009 • Leave a Comment

I recently ordered a couple of items to customize my own “docking station,” inasmuch as one can accomplish such a feat with a MacBook Pro.

The first component was an mStand, a stylish hunk of metal that elevates your laptop higher off the desk for better eye-line.  This works well, actually.  This is probably the only benefit, as I don’t notice any better cooling (or worse, for that matter) when it’s up there, but this one benefit is pretty cool since it takes some relief off my back from when I hunched over.

The second component was a wired keyboard.  (I avoided the wireless because Bluetooth keyboards are notorious for being annoying in the way they have trouble repairing and have horrid battery life.)  I chose an Apple keyboard for two reasons: one, I wanted one that had the Command key (unique to the Mac platform); and two, I wanted one that had an identical layout to my MacBook Pro’s keyboard (in terms of where the Fn key is, how the arrow keys are set, etc.).

Perfect match.

And then I already had a mouse.

So the whole setup looks great, especially since everything is made with anodized aluminum.

The only component I want now is a 24″ Cinema Display go next to the stand, since that would create a nice dual monitor setup.  We’ll see how big the next paycheck or two is.

FedEx Followup

•25 July 2009 • Leave a Comment

This followup is in reference to this post.

So FedEx called me (several times) to just reconfirm all the details I gave them.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to speak to the driver, which probably would have been confrontational.

In any case, all I had really wanted was for the local FedEx distribution center  to remind its employees that they cannot leave packages on doorsteps if they require a signature.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Hopefully that was accomplished.

Adaptation

•21 July 2009 • Leave a Comment

adaptation |ˌadapˈtā sh ən; ˌadəp-|

noun

the action or process of adapting or being adapted : the adaptation of teaching strategy to meet students’ needs | adaptations to the school curriculum.

a movie, television drama, or stage play that has been adapted from a written work, typically a novel : filming her adaptation of a beloved children’s book.

When speaking about a movie adaptation of a novel, we’ve all heard (or ourselves said), “The book was better.”  Indeed, most people regard the film versions of books with some measure of disdain, especially if they themselves were fans of the source materials before they saw the movies.

I’ve found myself thinking more about this with the recent release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  Most of the Harry Potter fans out there have a love-hate relationship with this series of films because of how unfaithful it has been at times.

I suppose these sorts of criticisms are often fair, but these considerations led me to the conclusion that there’s no such thing as definitive expression of art.  That is to say, even novels are themselves an adaptation, too.  Adapted from what, exactly?

A story exists in the mind long before it is put to paper, and I think this is true of all authors, if in varying degrees.  Even those who write in free form have certain expectations or understandings of the plot or the characters that inhabit them.  Granted, much of it is unconscious in those cases, but I think we’d be very foolish to think that those kinds of stories literally write themselves.

I think most people, even many writers, end up erroneously thinking their books are the definitive expressions of their ideas, that the actual writing craft is in part tantamount to the very meaning of the piece.  Honestly, that aspect is very much important to that expression (i.e. language methodology adds a very distinct flavor, so we can’t discount the importance of this).  However, the story itself is more than the medium upon which it is placed, even if it is invariably altered by that medium.  To describe one medium as being more important or better than another betrays a prejudice that has very little to do with reality.

We all have our preferences, sure, but if we are being truly honest with ourselves, we need to evaluate each work (be it written or visual) on its own merits, not in relation to how it was handled differently in another medium.  After all, the only true and definitive version of a story exists in exactly one place: the author’s mind.

But let us return to book-to-movie adaptations, specifically.  Many fans out there have unreasonable expectations about these.  The two artforms are very different — and I’m not just talking about time constraints, as important as those are.  Exposition, for example, is handled very differently, as is tension, characterization, pacing, and a myriad of other parts of storytelling.

Even taking this all into account, I think there are extremely valid reasons to criticize the Harry Potter movies, which I actually find to be extremely well acted, beautifully filmed, wonderfully costumed, and brilliantly set.  The trouble I have is that the films themselves don’t stand up very well on their own accord because the scriptwriters have had a problem prioritizing what parts of the novels to keep, and which parts to discard.

In disclosure, I’ll say that I’ve read the entire Harry Potter series twice, so I’m pretty familiar with them.  But I’m also honest enough to admit that much of it needs to be altered in order to function properly as movies.  Indeed, that requires the filmmakers to leave out much and alter considerably what’s left.  Is this a disservice to the source material?  I don’t think so, because I once again draw your attention to my thesis: the novels are not the one, true expression of their stories.  There are dimensions, feelings, ideas, and understanding that J.K. Rowling possesses about these stories that we will never appreciate because we are not in her head: the art of this whole process is that she has managed to (rather brilliantly) share a portion of those dimensions, ideas, and understanding — the ones she felt were most important, the ones she felt she could put to paper.

The filmmakers’ job is to re-express what she deemed important.  Upon reading the series, we realize there is a gravitas, a seriousness to the overall story that ought to be respected.  Instead, I’ve found the films to be often silly and usually capricious.  As ironic as it might seem to describe a series of books about a young boy wizard as logical, they are very much internally consistent.  Characters act according to the rules of J.K. Rowling’s universe.

The movies, on the other hand, often fail to take themselves as seriously as they should.  For example, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, there’s a part near the end when a shadowy figure saves Harry and from Dementors (demonic creatures that cause people around them to feel despair and relive their worst memories and have the ability to steal souls) by casting a Petronus charm, the only thing capable of frightening off Dementors.  (A Petronus is created by summoning up the most powerful and positive memory the caster can think — the most powerful ones take the form of some animal, which is somehow significant to that person’s disposition.)  The Petronus that saves Harry takes the form of a large stag.  From this, Harry surmises that the caster is no other than his deceased father.  Why?  The film does not explain this and betrays its seriousness by making Harry look irrational, even if he is a child.  But in the novel, we (along with Harry) learn earlier that Harry’s father had been a shapeshifter who could change into a stag.  So when Harry watched a giant, glowing stag save him, he naturally leapt to the conclusion that this was otherworldly manifestation of his father.  This assumption is false, as you might have guessed, but I won’t spoil here the true nature of his salvation.  (If you haven’t read these books, you ought to; if you’ve already read them, you should read them again.)

What I’ve described here has serious thematic implications that are undermined by poor prioritization on the part of the scriptwriter.  This wasn’t a complete failure, but is representative of a series of errors made in the adaptation of the Harry Potter stories.

Could the scriptwriter have expressed that scene in a different way while still leaving out the part about Harry’s dad’s shapeshifting ways?  Sure.  The movie-version of Harry could have simply not leapt to the conclusion that the glowing stag was his father.

Indeed, the most ironic decisions screenwriters make when adapting novels is that they are too slavish in preserving details like these.  The priority to the screenwriter was to pay tribute to that moment in the book, but due to time constraints had to leave out the rest of that thread.

This is why I say that scriptwriters need to be brave enough to not only leave out portions of the original source material but also change what remains.  Because books and movies are very different artforms, they must exist separately and wholly independent unto themselves.  But there is a preeminent version of the story that both must serve.

As a counterpoint, I offer one of the most brilliant adaptations I’ve ever seen in V for Vendetta.  The movie only bears a passing resemblance to the graphic novel in terms of its finer plot details, but it does a magnificent job capturing the themes and priorities of Alan Moore’s masterwork.

And that is what a re-expression of a story must honor: the very reason the original ever existed.  V for Vendetta and Harry Potter and every other piece of artwork exist to serve some needs of the authors (or some need the authors wishes to fulfill for their audiences).

Figuring that out and honoring it makes all the other finer points fall by the wayside.

An Unusual FedEx Experience

•20 July 2009 • Leave a Comment

I have a lot of good luck with FedEx over the years.  Aside from not delivering on Saturdays, I’m pretty happy with them as a company.  Unfortunately, I had an unusual — shall we say — mishaps recently.

I had sent in my MacBook Pro for realignment, which is a story in itself but one I’ll leave alone for now.  Apple uses FedEx for these mail-ins, which is normally very cool.  Even out here in the Rockies, they’re very prompt with overnighting the box back and forth.  However, something unusual happened when Apple sent the MacBook Pro back to me.  Due to an unfortunate collision of circumstances, I was out of town the day it was supposed to arrive, so I figured I’d just get it the next day when the FedEx driver came back for another delivery attempt.  (Because it contained a laptop, it naturally had a signature required mark on the delivery.)

Despite that being the case, the driver nevertheless actually left it on my doorstep and even went so far as to sign for me.  I’ve attached the signature-proof-of-delivery here.

The trouble is, I was in West Yellowstone, MT, when this was delivered, and there was NO ONE HOME to sign for me.  (I don’t know my neighbors well enough to do that for me, and the apartment manager would never have done that either.)

Fortunately, I saw that it was delivered with my BlackBerry before I drove into Yellowstone National Park (and inevitably lost service), so I was able to ask a friend to pick it up from my doorstep and hold onto it for me.

But could you imagine what might have happened if I hadn’t seen that it had been left?  What if it had rained?  Or what if it had been stolen?  The FedEx driver would have claimed indemnity because I had supposedly “signed for it.”

I reported the incident as a concern.  I don’t personally need anything from FedEx (i.e. compensation).  I just want them to post a memo in the office, as it were, about not doing things like that in the future.  In a weird way, I sort of understand the driver’s frustration with having to ascend the flights of stairs outside of my apartment over and over.  That said, there’s still no excuse because he or she is supposed to be a professional — whether that box was empty and worth nothing, or whether it was full and worth more than $2,000, as was the deal with my package.

Anyway, the FedEx phone representatives have been cool so far, but apparently they’re going to ask the driver what he was thinking tomorrow, and I might actually receive a call from him or her.  That should be interesting.

Updates to follow.

Effects on Meaning: Twists in Munro, Lahiri, and Trevor

•16 May 2009 • Leave a Comment

The last post on literary theory prompted me to also post this paper I wrote for a grad class awhile back:

Effects on Meaning: Twists in Munro, Lahiri, and Trevor

Many authors use twists, sudden and unexpected changes in a story’s flow of events, but one of the problems inherent to this method is figuring out how to avoid buggering the reader; in other words, authors must consider the nature of twists, asking which elements of a story they may alter and which they may not, so as to ensure a satisfactory ending.  Both Alice Munro (in “Fits”) and Jhumpa Lahiri (in “A Temporary Matter”) succeed because their reversals accentuate their stories’ meanings, not create them, whereas William Trevor (in “In at the Birth”) employs a twist that does create the meaning for the story, thereby creating a less-than-satisfying denouement.

To begin, let’s work from a couple of definitions.  First, each time a story alters course and heads in a direction unanticipated by the reader, that change might be called a twist, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s restrict the term to a reversal or revelation in the climax (or the denouement) that affects the interpretation of the meaning or the characters inhabiting the story.  Second, let’s define theme; defined simply, theme is “A message or meaning embedded in a narrative, or (preferably) evolving naturally out of a narrative” (Bell 374).  More specifically, let’s think of the theme as the meaning that unifies the entire piece.

The three questions I’ll be asking about the twists for the aforementioned stories are as follows: how is the buildup to the twist maintained throughout the story, so that when it happens the reversal doesn’t feel false; what mechanism is responsible for revealing the twist, and is that mechanism appropriate to the character or to the rules for the world established in the narrative; and finally, what are the thematic effects that occurs as a result of the twist?

*

1. Maintenance

In order to avoid making the twist feel false when the reader arrives at it in the narrative, the author must drop suggestions about the revelation during the buildup, so that when the turnaround occurs, it feels unpredictable and yet inevitable, as though the story couldn’t have ended any other way.  This aspect of the twist is the lengthiest, since clues have to be threaded throughout the breadth of the narrative.

Alice Munro’s “Fits”

In “Fits,” the reader finds out at the end that Peg’s account of how she discovered the Weebles’ bodies was inaccurate: she had told her husband that when she’d gone over to deliver the Weeble’s eggs, she looked for the couple upstairs and found Mr. Weeble’s leg sticking out from his room, from behind the door; upon further investigation, she found that both of the Weebles were dead inside from bullet wounds.  However, the reader leans at the end that what she really saw was Mr. Weeble’s severed head, ripped off from the blast of self-inflicted shotgun wound, and that Mrs. Weeble was dead inside, the victim of a murder-suicide, and that Peg ventured farther into the room, despite the sight of Mr. Weeble.

Since most of the story is told from the perspective of Peg’s husband, Robert, his suspicion that Peg didn’t tell him the whole truth is what drives the buildup forward.  The first indication that there might be a difference between Peg’s account and the truth appears early-on: “[Robert] pictured what happened.  First from the constable’s report, then from Peg’s” (Munro 434); Robert imagines the scene from two different vantages.

When Robert conveys Peg’s account, the reader already knows that the Weebles are dead because the story opens, “The two people who died were in their early sixties” (429), thus signifying that there’s more to learn from the scene than that fact.  In other words, the tension of the story must rest on something besides finding these two bodies.

The first solid hint that Peg intuited that the couple was dead is recorded towards the end of Robert’s account of what happened when Peg went to the Weebles’ home:

Peg walked now across the clean, pale carpet to the foot of the stairs, which were carpeted in the same material.  She started to climb.  She did not call [for the Weebles] again.

She must have known then or she would have called. (436)

Robert obsesses over this idea, since he repeats the thought again a few paragraphs later, saying, “She didn’t call; she didn’t halt again.  She climbed the stairs and didn’t look around as she came up; she faced straight ahead” (437), as if he was relating this with a measure of horror.  Naturally, the reader has to wonder why Robert is so transfixed on this one detail, something Peg mentioned casually.  Because Robert, the central character, is intrigued, the reader is as well.

Robert continues to investigate the matter, even by questioning Peg’s coworker Karen.  Immediately, the reader learns that the situation is more complex than Peg let on.  Karen relates that when Peg showed up for work, she was distant, and when Karen told Peg that her neighbors were murdered, Peg replies that she knows, that “It was murder suicide…  He shot her in the head and then shot himself.  That’s what happened” (438), with a marked degree of nonchalance.  By comparison to Karen, who is shocked by the revelation, Robert—and by extension, the reader—becomes suspicious of Peg.  This investigation continues as such, until the twist is revealed in the final two paragraphs of the story.

The maintenance of twist works well here because the details the reader learns along the way make sense with what Munro shows us of the characters—if the reveal had been different, that Peg had murdered the Weebles, for instance, the buildup would have been false and the ending would have felt like a cheat.

Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter”

In “A Temporary Matter,” the reader finds out at the end that Shukumar has been concealing details from his wife about the death of their baby: Shoba, his wife, had always thought Shukumar hadn’t made it to the hospital in time for the childbirth, when their baby was stillborn (since he was in Baltimore), and that neither she nor her husband knew the gender of their child.  However, the truth is that Shukumar did make it, and that he cradled their dead son in his arms, having never spoken of it because Shoba took solace in not knowing anything about the baby.

Since the death of their child, Shukumar and Shoba haven’t been comfortable around one another, so Lahiri uses the inconvenience of city maintenance on a power-line as a catalyst to force the couple together: “The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M.” (Lahiri 1).  Shoba decides to make use of the time by playing a game: “How about telling each other something we’ve never told before” (13).  The reader discovers early on that Shoba’s desire to play this game runs deeper than as a means to pass the time because, as Shukumar observes, “He couldn’t think of anything, but Shoba was waiting for him to speak.  She hadn’t appeared so determined in months.”  The buildup occurs over the course of the story, as each night passes, and the severity of the revealed-secrets increases, from benign to detrimental.  When the power comes back on the last night, the reader has been set up to expect an extreme revelation from one of the two, if not both.

Lahiri lays the groundwork for Shukumar’s admission that he had held their baby throughout.  The doubt is first framed when Shukumar reflects on the time his mother-in-law came to visit, and how “She never talked to him about Shoba; once, when he mentioned the baby’s death, she looked up from her knitting, and said, ‘But you weren’t even there’” (9).  The notion that Shukumar wasn’t at the birth comes into question, in the reader’s mind, early, when Shukumar is thinking about a rice ceremony for someone else’s baby that Shoba had been to, and how the baby had cried there: “Their baby had never cried, Shukumar considered” (11), leaving the reader to wonder how he knew this so definitively.  Another large hint occurs the second night of the game, when Shoba and Shukumar are outside, and Shukumar is wondering what his wife might tell him next: “The worst possibilities had already run through his head.  That she’d had an affair….  That she blamed him for being in Baltimore the way her mother did.  But he knew those things weren’t true” (16).  Lahiri craftily distracts from this revelation by explaining that Shukumar is certain his wife has been faithful, but the author doesn’t address the claim that Shukumar wasn’t present for the birth, leaving the issue open for the ending to address.

Due to the increasing tension in the truth game between Shoba and Shukumar and the emphasis on the husband’s absence from the birth, the climactic reveal feels appropriate, even inevitable.

Trevor’s “In at the Birth”

In “In at the Birth,” two revelations are made by the end: first, the baby Miss Efoss thinks she’s sitting for, the one she’s never been allowed to go upstairs and see, is actually an elderly man—that the Dutts care for old people and think of them as children; second, that Miss Efoss willingly decides to join them and becomes their new child after the elderly man passes away.  Trevor builds up to his twist in two ways: Miss Efoss questions, continually, why she’s not allowed to see Mickey, the Dutts’ child; and the Dutts treat her as though she herself is a child, condescending and patronizing her throughout the piece.

From the beginning, the Dutts seek out Miss Efoss as a babysitter.  When she arrives at their home to look after Mickey for the evening, Mr. Dutt tells them that if their child makes any noise, they should telephone them immediately, to which Miss Efoss responds, “Oh, but I’m sure that’s not necessary.  It would be a pity to spoil your evening so.  I could at least attempt to comfort him” (Trevor 105).  Mr. Dutt responds, “I would prefer the other arrangement.  Mickey does not take easily to strangers.  His room is at the top of the house, but please do not enter it.”  Naturally, this seems unusual to Miss Efoss (and, indeed, the reader), but even as she sits for Mickey again and again, the Dutts remain insistent that Miss Efoss not meet the child.  Even when she suggests that she come early one day so that she can introduce herself, so that if there’s ever a problem she could comfort him, Mr. Dutt says, “But he doesn’t wake, Miss Efoss.  He has never woken, has he?  You have never had to telephone us” (107).

Though creepy, the Dutts’ honesty doesn’t come into question until Miss Efoss attends a party and runs into an old friend there.  When she tells him that she’s been babysitting for Mr. and Mrs. Dutt, whom the friend has met, he is shocked: “I think you must be mistaken….  I cannot help but being surprised.  Because, Miss Efoss—and of this I am certain—the Dutts have no children” (108).

Miss Efoss begins to wonder if she herself is losing her mind, that perhaps because she is growing old, she’s confused about what the Dutts have her do.  Her lack of faith in her own mental capacity is but one component of her journey from adult to infant in the story.  Mr. Dutt is often paternal with Miss Efoss, such as when he drives her home one day and says, “A child is a great comfort.  Mickey is a real joy for us.  And company for Beryl.  The days hangs (sic) heavy when one is alone all day” (106), or when Mr. Dutt offers to pay for her tea later: “It’s a small thing but would give me pleasure.  May I pay for your tea?  Beryl will be pleased if you allow me to” (111).

While the revelation that Mickey’s actually an elderly man, and not a child, is perfectly consistent with the buildup in the narrative, the notion that Miss Efoss would be willing to become the Dutts new infant at the end, to replace the late Mickey, seems outrageous.  For one, the only hint that Miss Efoss is becoming like a child again is contained in small actions like the ones I listed above; second, there’s no valid mechanism described for this to happen, as will be discussed in section two.

*

2. Mechanism

The second aspect I’m analyzing is the mechanism that causes the twist.  Does the event in the story appear warranted from what the reader knows of the characters (internal forces) or of the world (external forces)?  When a twist fails in the latter case, externally, we characterize the plot as having a Deus ex Machina, and in the former case, we consider the story to have inconsistent characters.  To avoid these, the mechanism must be consistent with the buildups, which I’ve already outlined above.  Since the reversal occurs in the climax or denouement, its breadth is far smaller than the amount of time spent on the maintenance of the twist.

Munro’s “Fits”

Munro conveys the manner in which the twist is revealed quite naturally, on the last page: “[The constable] had described how the force of the shot threw Walter Weeble backward.  ‘It blasted him partways through the room.  His head was laying out in the hall.  What was left of it…’” (453).  Robert then realizes that what Peg saw wasn’t Mr. Weeble’s leg, which she claimed made her check the room—instead, she saw the horror of the scene, the gore all over the walls and the severed head, and she proceeded forward nevertheless.  Since we followed Robert’s investigation through the entire narrative, the way he discovers the truth makes sense.

Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter”

The manner in which Lahiri reveals the truth was at the end, the night the power is restored, when Shoba confesses that she intends to move out from her and Shukumar’s apartment, and that she had already signed the lease for another apartment earlier that very evening.  Shukumar realizes, “This was the point of her game” (21).  He’s so hurt by her decision, he decides to inflict the most injury he can in an action perfectly consistent with his character, by revealing all he knew about the baby—all that she never wanted to know:

“Our baby was a boy,” he said.  “His skin was more red than brown.  He had black hair on his head.  He weighed almost five pounds.  His fingers were curled shut, just like yours in the night.”

…These were the things he had told her.  He had held his son, who had known life only within her, against his chest in a darkened room in an unknown wing of the hospital.  (22)

Trevor’s “In at the Birth”

Since there are two twists in Trevor’s story, there are two mechanisms.  The first is how Miss Efoss determines that Mickey is an elderly man; the second is how Miss Efoss decides to join the Dutts and become their new child.

As the buildup suggested, the reader knows something is amiss in the Dutts’ demand that Mickey not be disturbed.  Moreover, Miss Efoss thinks she losing her mind, that she isn’t at the Dutts to baby-sit a child after all.  With the child being only right upstairs, Miss Efoss decides to look in on him and disaffirm her fears:

In the second [room] she heard breathing and knew she was right….  In one of the far corners was a large cot.  It was very large and very high and it contained the sleeping figure of a very old man.  (109)

Miss Efoss is disturbed by her discovery, so she decides to not sit for the Dutts anymore, though she doesn’t bring up the point that Mickey is an elderly man with anyone.  She therefore goes on her own and doesn’t see the Dutts for a year, until the day she runs into them at a park.  Mr. Dutt tells her that Mickey has died and that they are beside themselves with grief, lamenting, “They have all died, Miss Efoss….  One by one they have all died…  It’s almost unbearable to be childless again” (110).  After their conversation, from which Miss Efoss hurriedly flees, she begins “to feel older.”  Sometime soon after, she happens to run into Mr. Dutt a second time, at a café where he stares at her, pondering her appearance:

As he looked at her, his face suddenly cleared.  He smiled, and when he spoke he seemed to be entirely present.

“I have great news, Miss Efoss.  We are both so happy about it.  Miss Efoss, Beryl is expecting a child.  (110)

Even though the news should disturb her in light of what she discovered when she found Mickey, she doesn’t leave or balk at Mr. Dutt’s claim.  Indeed, when Mr. Dutt offers to pay for her tea, she says, “‘Yes, Mr. Dutt, you may pay for my tea.’  And it was as she spoke this simple sentence that it dawned upon Miss Efoss just what it was she had to do” (111).

Of course, this second mechanism is far weaker than the first—why should she feel she has to now move in with the Dutts and become their new child?  No part of the story indicates that Miss Efoss is needy in that extreme, and the only minor indications that she’s becoming childlike was mentioned earlier, that she questioned her own competency and had felt older since finding out about Mickey.  So why?

*

3. Thematic Effect

The final aspect of the twist is the amount by which the turnaround affects the denouement and the unifying theme of the story—if the writer were to remove the twist and all the maintenance it received, would the story still retain any of its original meaning?  Does the point of the story hinge upon this device?

Munro’s “Fits”

Thematically, Munro deals with the destructibility of relationships, further reinforced by Peg’s obsession with seeing something as morbid as the Weebles’ bodies, a fascination with the possibility of it happening to her.  The reader gets this sense throughout because so much time is spent describing failed relationships, even beyond the Weebles’.  The reader knows that Peg has been married once before, but “got a divorce” (430), and that Robert’s last relationship before he married Peg was with a married woman named Lee, and the story describes how their last argument became so vicious they had to laugh about it with “murderous pleasure” (450).

Finally, the strongest suggestion that Robert and Peg might have problems like this in the future is when Peg’s son, Clayton, responds to Robert’s suggestion that the Weebles were just a freak occurrence, a kind of fit, like a volcano or an earthquake: “[Those] aren’t freaks….  If you want to call that a fit, you’d have to call it a periodic fit.  Such as people have, married people have.”  When Robert denies that he and Peg have such inclinations, Peg says nothing in return.

The reason the twist works in Munro’s piece is that it punctuates the theme of the story, but doesn’t define it.  That Peg saw the horror even before she made it all the way up the stairs, and that she kept going anyway, isn’t an essential detail to convey this theme, but the twist throws focus on her obsession with it and, therefore, its importance.

Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter”

Lahiri’s story is concerned with a failure in communication and what effects that has on a relationship.  The couple’s inability to confront the death of their son, deciding to not think about him at all (ignoring the elephant in the room, as it were), destroys their marriage—but as the game they play proves, this decision to not talk about the death is only a symptom, not the problem.  They haven’t ever been that honest with one another.

The story ends: “Shoba turned the lights off.  She came back to the table and sat down, and after a moment Shukumar joined her.  They wept together, for the things they now knew” (22), the epitome of their inability to communicate.

The relationship seems permanently destroyed as result, since “[Shukumar] had promised himself that day [the baby died] that he would never tell Shoba, because he still loved her then, and it was the one thing in her life that she wanted to be a surprise[, the gender of the child].”  His decision stems out of spite and doesn’t leave much hope for reconciliation.

Though Shukumar’s revelation is startling, it accentuates the theme, that ignoring such a glaring problem like this would sever the marriage—the turnaround alters our perception of why he was so distant from his wife.

Trevor’s “In at the Birth”

Trevor’s piece espouses the belief that society treats the elderly like infants.  The twist that the Dutts are caring for an elderly man upstairs works because of how it was maintained and revealed, as mentioned above, but the decision by Miss Efoss to join them had very little buildup—indeed, the point where she decides to live with them creating the second part of theme for the piece—that the elderly succumb to society’s perceptions that they are infantile.

The story concludes when Miss Efoss sells off all her belongings and comes to the Dutts’ home one evening:

Miss Efoss carried a small suit case.  She said: “Your baby, Mrs Dutt.  When is your baby due?  I hope I am in time.”

“Perfect, Miss Efoss, perfect,” said Mr Dutt.  “Beryl’s child is due this very night.”

…Miss Efoss did not sit down.  “I am rather tired,” she said.  “Do you mind if I go straight upstairs?”  (112)

The ending is unsettling to the reader because of how bizarre Miss Efoss’s behavior seems.  Indeed, aside from feeling older towards of “In at the Birth,” she gives no indications that would ever consider becoming the Dutts’ child until the very moment it happens—and the manner in which she goes up the stairs is eerie because everyone in the room seems to know that this is the decision she needs to make.  Aside from being far-fetched in terms of what a reader would expect from a person, this event has the catastrophic effect of buggering the reader—by creating the point of the story on the last page instead of the first.

*

In order to use a twist properly, the author must satisfy the three criteria I outlined at the start: the twist’s buildup must be maintained throughout; the twist’s mechanism has to be consistent with what the reader would expect of the characters or of the fictional world; and the twist must accentuate the theme of the story, not create it.

Munro’s “Fits” and Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” satisfy these fundamental requirements.  Munro does so by threading the suspicious nature of Peg’s account throughout the story; by revealing the truth in a reasonable way, as the result of Robert’s investigation; and by using the twist to magnify the theme of the story, which is concerned with the destructibility of relationships.  Lahiri does so by increasing the tension of the secrets game and by throwing doubt on how Shukumar wasn’t at baby’s birth; by using the secrets game as the mechanism for the revelation, which is also brought on by Shoba’s decision to leave; and by using the twist to stress how secrets can unravel a relationship.

Trevor’s “In at the Birth” succeeds with the first twist, that the Dutts are caring for an elderly man who is supposedly their child because the twist was built-up through Miss Efoss’s curiosity about Mickey, was revealed in a reasonable way when she went upstairs, and contributed to the theme about how society sees its elderly as infants—though this first twist depends on the second for meaning.  When Miss Efoss decides to join the Dutts as their new child, this twist isn’t built-up through the story.  The mechanism seems unreasonable because of how out-of-character it seems.  Moreover, because the theme is created there at that moment, the story doesn’t hold together as well.  If Trevor had thoroughly seeded the notion that Miss Efoss needed caring for, that she was becoming infantile, then the rest would have fallen into place—the eeriness of her decision to join them would have made sense on the character level, and the mechanism would have sufficed enough to pull this off.

As the stories stand, “Fits” and “A Temporary Matter” are strong examples of how to employ the twist method.  “In at the Birth” fails in its overdependence on this method, turning the twist into a gimmick.

Works Cited

Bell, Madison Smartt.  “Glossary.”  Narrative Design.  New York: Norton & Company.  1997.  374.

Lahiri, Jhumpa.  “A Temporary Matter.”  Interpreter of Maladies.  New York: Mariner Books.  1999.  1-22.

Munro, Alice.  “Fits.”  Selected Stories.  New York: Vintage Contemporaries.  1997.  429-453.

Trevor, William.  “In at the Birth.”  The Collected Stories.  New York: Penguin Books.  1992.  102-112.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

•16 May 2009 • Leave a Comment

Don’t want to write a full review here, but am I the only one irritate by how self indulgent the movie was at times?  Let me mitigate this criticism before I get too far by saying that I enjoyed the movie well enough, but prequels just bug me at their core.

To me, I wish prequels would work stand on their own and do nothing to damage the original movies if you were to watch them all in story-chronological order.  Illuminate?  Sure.  Undermine?  No.  For example, the Star Wars prequels (Eps 1-3) reveal plot twists from the original Star Wars trilogy (Eps 4-6), and watching them in the story’s chronological order actually unravels important plot points.  Example: Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker is Luke’s father.  And that Leia is Luke’s sister.

(That’s not really the most offensive problem, though.  Another example is the neutering of important plot elements in the later storylines.  Case in point, the Force is an enigmatic, metaphysical power in the original trilogy.  It was a beautiful mystery, a part of nature that bound all living things together.  However, in the prequels (which were set in a time when more was known about all things Jedi/Sith), we discover that the Force is actually the physical result of midi-chlorians (microorganisms) which reside in the cells of all living things.  Talk about taking something whimsical and rendering it cold and clinical.  It takes the metaphysical and reduces it to presudoscience.)

The Wolverine movie isn’t that extreme, but there are an awful lot of nods to the X-Men trilogy, to the point that I felt like the moviemakers were winking at me every half hour or so.

There are several examples, but I’ll focus on two.  For these examples, pretend you know nothing about the three movies which take place after this one.  Nothing about the X-Men mythology as a whole.

1. Striker’s son.  We seem him encased in ice, and knowing what we know from the X-Men trilogy, this makes perfect sense for that point of the timeline.  However, the movie does nothing to explain this, other than to reveal that he’s a mutant when the general confronts Striker about him.  Striker, being nuts, has imprisoned him.  (We know this is because of his ability to create illusion from the movies, but let’s forget that for now.)  This isn’t addressed in any other way here: instead, we’re left with a rather shocking and striking image of a child locked away in stasis.  Seems very cruel.  When Wolverine rescues all the other mutants on the island, we can only wonder why Striker’s son is left dangling.

Yes, yes, Wolverine doesn’t technically know about him, but we can’t forget Anton Chekov’s gun: do not include an unnecessary element in the story.  If you show me there’s a gun hanging on the wall, it’s going to need to be fired at some point.  If you show me a child in peril and we have a hero in the story who should be in the business of rescuing imperiled children, then something needs to happen with him.  The reason nothing happens, of course, is that he needs to stay there so he can screw with Xavier in X2: X-Men United.  This merely distracts us in this movie, however.

2. Xavier rescues the mutants.  Again, forget you know who Xavier is.  Who the hell is this telepathic bald dude who comes from nowhere to pick up the mutants who were an important part of Wolverine and Gambit’s actions on the island?  What starts as a fairly serious plot/character turn (Wolverine turns from his selfish desires for revenge and does something legitimately heroic), ends with Wolverine getting distracted by Deadpool and the rescued mutants going off on their own.  Instead, the blinded young Cyclops gets led to freedom telepathically by a character who is never referenced nor explained.  We get a shot of Patrick Stewart by the helicopter where he smiles as the audience in what amounts to a moment that only serves to tie the prequel into the X-Men trilogy in a very cutesy way.  This is a perfect example of the universally maligned Deus ex Machina*, which is akin to the randomness — and, indeed, unfairness — of giant Eagles rescuing Gandalf (and later Frodo and Sam) in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  This would have worked if, say, Gambit was shown facilitating this rescue.  Then at least an established character would be helping to shape the climax of this subplot.

But writers need to allow their main characters to actively participate in big developments like this, and not have them happen to the characters, passively.  This is what we call agency**.  Do the main characters have agency, or does a non-character or force of nature (a Deus ex Machina) have it?

Terms

* deus ex machina |ˈdāəs eks ˈmäkənə; -ˈmak-|nounan unexpected power or event savingseemingly hopeless situation, esp. as a contrived plot device in a play or novel

** agency |ˈājənsē|noun2 action or intervention, esp. such as to produce a particular effect :canals carved by the agency of running water | a belief in various forms of supernatural agency.a thing or person that acts to produce a particular result : the movies could be an agency molding the values of the public.

Anyway, I don’t want to sit here and make it sound like I hated the movie.  Again, I enjoyed it insofar as it was a fun action movie.

My greater complaint here is about the general subject of prequels, and how they are beholden to storylines that haven’t technically happened yet.  Worse still, I resent the graver sins of creating Deus ex Machinas in order to sustain those ties to their future storylines.  This isn’t the same as setting a baseline for foreshadowing: it’s purely self aggrandizing.  And it’s cheating.

Enough literary theory for the day.

P.S.  I had a hard time thinking of a prequel that I really liked, and then I remembered The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

P.P.S. Also, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is technically a prequel, too.  As good as the original?  Not even close.  But at least it didn’t screw with Raiders of the Lost Ark, and spend a bunch of time acknowledging the original movie.

Sci-Fi TV and Me – May 16, 2009

•16 May 2009 • Leave a Comment

Just wanted to drop some thoughts on the sci-fi shows I watch, with emphasis on their finales.  This is spoiler-laden.  You have been warned.

1. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

The finale ended in a very strange way, perhaps one that will confuse most people.  Sarah makes a conscious decision to not follow her son, John, into the future to remain attached to him at the hip at every single moment — as she’s been apt to do since she was pregnant with him at the end of the first Terminator movie.  Instead, she allows him to go off by himself with the T-1001 into one of the possible futures.  (Yeah, they’ve gotten into the whole alternate timelines thing.  There are two characters on the show from two separate future realities, and they don’t have the same recollections as a result.)  Odd.  Anyway, I get the sense Sarah feels like she needs to stop the war from happening more than anything — that following John would be a mere tactical decision that would keep him protected in the short term, whereas not following him and trying to undermine Skynet in the present is a better, braod strategic decision for his well-being (and the world at large by extension).  Convoluted but interesting.  Probably never find out what they were thinking, though, since I fully expect the show to be cancelled.  I can only hope to eat those words, but its continued bad ratings are the result of a weak storyline involving Reily.  They gambled on that screwy subplot and lost.

2. Dollhouse

The finale was fun, even if I’m not sure I buy how Helo Agathon — I mean Paul Ballard — decided to start working for the Dollhouse.  Yes, this gives him an opportunity to keep a close eye on it, and vice versa from the Dollhouse’s perspective.  Do we really believe, however, that the Dollhouse, with all its resources, really needs Ballard to help hunt down Alpha?  True, they hadn’t been able to find him previously, but who’s to say that some ex-FBI agent whom they duped for months with a next-door neighbor Doll qualifies as a brain trust?  Anyway, the show was renewed for a second season, with the caveat that its budget will be reduced.  Bummer, but the show honestly failed to earn its second season, and was only granted one due to the guaranteed DVD sales courtesy of the Cult of Whedon.  Don’t get me wrong: I love the show.  But its ratings were abysmal, and Whedon can no longer point the finger at Fox mangling with his show’s schedule, a la Firefly.  His weak pilot only served to turn many viewers away before he could even establish an audience, and since then, they’ve hemorrhaged their remaining viewers every week.  If TV executives weren’t so cuthroat, I’d be inclined to say the second season of Dollhouse is an apology for what they did to Firefly: regardless, we’ll have to wait until later this year to see if this investment is worth it.

3. Fringe

I still love this show.  It’s straining a little under the weight of its own conceits, I won’t lie.  But they whipped out Leonard Nimoy as Dr. William Bell, so I remain sold.  And the image at the end of finale in the alternate Earth where the Word Trade Center is still standing was, in a word, ballsy.  (Another Fox show whipped out an unexpected reference: Lie to Me had a terrorist plot that is initially attributed to Al Qaeda, though this is later disproved.  I’m a little surprised to be seeing these kinds of references dropped so easily: is it too soon?)  However, I do take one exception with an image from the alternate Earth.  There’s a picture of the Obamas moving into the “new White House” on the front of a newspaper.  Ignoring why there’s a new White House, let’s focus on Barak Obama being president in another reality: isn’t it more reasonable to think that John Kerry would have defeated George W. Bush in 2004, were it not for the Trade Center attacks which provided him with a lot of gravitas that he didn’t have otherwise?  (Not a political statement: just an observation.)  I think a headline reading that Kerry was elected to a second term would have been more likely.  Anyway, I can’t wait for next season of J.J. Abram’s funhouse of crazy science fiction.

4. Smallville

Not legitimately sci-fi, but since I mentioned it in my last post on this subject, I’ll mention it here.  So, I like this season much better than last, though the finale was a bit odd.  I mean, seriously?  That’s all we get for the epic Doomsday fight?  One big punch followed by a super jump?  Sigh.  I am happy to hear, however, that the drastic thing they do in this episode (kill Jimmy Olsen) is something they don’t intend to take back.  I’ve been critical of this nonsense of showing us something for one episode only to yank it away at the end — usually courtesy of some kind of time-altering device.  Yes, this a dramatic departure from canon, but you’d have to be insane to think that there’s any way Smallville fits into the Superman mythos for even a moment.  Consider it an alternate reality (Elseworlds).

5. Heroes and Battlestar Galactica

I’ve yet to resume watching these shows and will do so soon, now that I’m running out of stuff to watch.  Reactions to follow eventually.

Some BlackBerry Thoughts

•7 May 2009 • Leave a Comment
BlackBerry Phones

BlackBerry Phones

Working in cell phone retail gets me access to a variety of phones. This can be pretty fun, as is the case when I get to try out the latest BlackBerry smart phones. I like the OS and the feel of the phones themselves, so I get most excited about new versions of these. (A caveat: I’d probably be an iPhone user if AT&T were in this area. I’ll take what I can get in the meantime.)

So here are my brief feelings main BlackBerry phones offered by Alltel and Verizon:

Pearl 8330
This is a nice phone, considering the price. (The company I work for offers it free after rebate.) To make it “phone-sized,” the compromise is the smaller screen and keyboard. Compared to the full keyboard BBs out there, the Pearl’s keyboard is a bit spartan. There are two letters on each key, versus the three often found on regular cell phones, which actually affords is greater accuracy with guessing your intent. Similar to T9, “SureType” uses its 30,000+ word dictionary, mixed with a bit of statistical hocus pocus, to render each word correctly. It fails horribly at last names, as you’d expect, but you can engage a manual, “Multitap” mode that lets you tap out each letter as you need it. (For instance, the G-H key would require you to hit it twice to get to H in this mode.)

The 2MP camera is nice, but as with all BlackBerries, you have to install an SD media card to enable video recording.

Aside from a small screen and keyboard, the other factor to consider is the relatively small amount of memory included on the phone. BlackBerries use their flash memories as both a storage device and as RAM, and adding more via media card only appears to give you storage for media, not for applications or RAM.  So, the internal flash is all you have for the software itself.

Curve 8330
This is the phone I own, and I like it a lot. It’s wide, which makes it an awkward phone to keep you in your pants pocket, so I use a holster. But the benefit of having it so wide is that I get a full keyboard, which I just feel more comfortable typing on. The keys on the Curve aren’t as nice as the World or the Bold (neither of which I’ll be describing here); they’re actually a bit hard.  That said, they’re easier to locate via touch.

The camera and software all appear to be identical to the Pearl, though you did get quite a bit more internal memory over the smaller phone.  Again, this is important for running multiple applications.

One minor point of annoyance: the media card slot is hidden behind the battery, unlike the Pearl, which has the slot on the side.

Pearl Flip 8220
This phone just came out, and we’re all pretty excited about it. Aside from the obvious change of being a more traditional-style flip phone, the screen resolution is miles ahead of the 8130 Pearl and 8330 Curve. We’re talking iPhone-ish pixel density here, so everything looks stunning. Colors pop, blacks look really black, and it has the beautiful 4.6 interface to go with it. (This is compared to the Curve and Pearl, which have 4.5 — there’s quite a difference between the two.)

The Pearl Flip has about the same camera, as far as we can tell, and has moved the media expansion slot behind the battery (boo!). A couple of improvements around memory, though: the internal is twice as big as the Pearl 8130, and it can accept a 16GB microSDHC card, compared to the limitation of 8GB, found on the previous mentions.

Another improvement is an enlarged SureType-style keyboard. The Pearl 8130 has the same layout, but its keys are much smaller than this Pearl Flip.

The only offensive thing I see is the use of micro-USB instead of mini-USB for the connector. I understand that LG and Motorola are trending towards that same one, but our tests showed significant performance decreases due to the change. I can find no reason for this, since I haven’t found documentation that says micro-USB is slower than mini-USB, but it sure seemed like it when we moved music onto a phone that used it.

Storm 9530
Our store doesn’t sell this phone, since we’re not a Verizon dealer, but one of my coworkers owns it. Despite failing to be an iPhone killer (as was claimed), this is a pretty neat device. That clicking touchscreen is weird, though. It works, and I think the compromise may be worth it if you intend to use the phone for other applications besides typing. Web surfing and media look great on this screen, which is also jaw-droppingly gorgeous, just like the Pearl Flip.

The upgraded camera (3.2MP) is nice, and it looks like the software that governs it is more advanced than previous BBs.

There’s a lot more metal on the phone (which may be only an aesthetic decision): I’m not sure if this is causing 3G interference, but we noticed a weaker signal strength side-by-side to the other phones in our store. Also, they placed the 16GB memory slot behind the battery on this one again, which is irritating.

The Storm also abandoned the ubiquitous mini-USB in favor of the micro, much my chagrin. Such is life.

The Storm uses the 4.7 OS, which as far as I can see, is the same as the 4.6 OS except that it supports the touch interface.

As a final note, none of these phones support rev.A as yet. Revision A, for those of you who don’t know, is a spec upgrade on EVDO which permits speeds up to 3.1Mbps (vs. 2.4Mbps under the previous spec). We notice the speed difference more on the data cards than the phones, but I wish RIM would build support in for this. HTC, which produces Windows Mobile phones for us, has had the rev.A in the firmware for a long time now.