GOODBYE BLACKBERRY WAY [350]

Formerly named Research In Motion (RIM), BlackBerry Limited is a Canadian company involved in cybersecurity software and services, numbering businesses and governments among its clients. I only say this to dispel the image of BlackBerry as the smartphone originator that went down in a shrieking ball of flames, outpaced by Apple and Samsung, which devoured both its consumer and business customer base. It would be like labelling IBM a failure for selling its personal computer business to Lenovo in 2005, as they moved to concentrate on cloud computing.

However, BlackBerry did suffer a number of issues that ultimately decided the future direction of the company, coalescing around the release of one phone in January 2013, the Z10. I owned one of these, and despite having owning four iPhones since then, I still think of the Z10 as being a good phone, even still an ideal one in many respects.

My previous two phones were also BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?), a purple Curve 8520 followed by a black Curve 9320. Originally bought because its tiny QWERTY keyboards made sending text messages earlier, these palm-sized devices invented the modern smartphone, shifting me from pay-as-you-go phone calls to stay in touch, to monthly data contracts and productivity on the go, backed by the encryption of BlackBerry’s operating system and messenger software.

The Z10 changed this form factor. Competing at the time with the iPhone 5, the Samsung Galaxy S3, and the upcoming aluminium HTC One, the Z10 jettisoned the keyboard and navigation buttons, and the touch-sensitive navigation pad that replaced an earlier click wheel, bringing in a touch-sensitive screen – for people who needed the original set-up, the BlackBerry Q10 retained a QWERTY keyboard.

The Z10 lacked even a home button, still found on the other three phones, instead using gesture controls like moving a finger up the screen to come out of an app, or up and right to enter the BlackBerry Hub, which collected e-mails, texts and notifications into one place. The virtual keyboard introduced predictive typing, based on what I entered previously, a first for the time. While plastic in construction, the Z10 felt heavy and robust, surviving many drops, and the battery was replaceable, something I now rue when I consider if my current iPhone needs a new battery.

BlackBerry Curve 8520

As intuitive as the Z10’s operating system was, it was plagued by delays and superficially didn’t look too different from Android or Apple’s iOS, especially when those systems were updated, and when app developers moved to concentrate on them instead – I don’t remember downloading many apps on my Z10, having made icons on the home screen that linked to the web browser instead. By the nature of its form factor, the Z10 itself looked like a standard smartphone, and not like a BlackBerry. It also had an odd advertising launch, its SuperBowl ad in 2013 featuring a user of the phone bursting into flames, growing elephant legs, disappearing into a puff of smoke, and turning a crashing petrol tanker into a wave of rubber ducks: “in thirty seconds, it’s quicker to show you what it can’t do,” but the glimpses there were pass too quickly to register.

With Apple and Android phones becoming more attractive propositions in 2013, more people making the switch to smartphones chose these over BlackBerry, the cybersecurity layer of their apps also being matched. By the end of 2013, the company’s leadership had changed, and begun restructuring. The first BlackBerry phone that ran Android instead of their own system was released in 2015, and moved to license their manufacture to outside companies from 2016 – as of 2022, no new BlackBerry phones are being made.

I replaced my Z10 with a new iPhone 6 in 2014, my support for BlackBerry not having wavered despite a massive outage of their servers in 2011 that disabled its services for a number of days. However, their best phone at the time was the Passport, a passport-shaped phone with QWERTY keyboard too wide for me to use with one hand. In hindsight, it was a bad choice at that moment – iOS had only just added predictive text to the keyboard, but the iPhone’s main processor was slightly slower, it had only 1 GB RAM instead of the Z10’s 2GB, the home button was a step backwards from the Z10’s gesture controls, and I could no longer replace the battery. At least the iPhone still had a headphone jack.

BlackBerry Passport

IT’S GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU [314]

The original JPhone emoji set (1997)

As silly as it sounds, I decided I was not going to use emoji when I realised I didn’t know what any of them were supposed to mean. Their implementation as a keyboard on my phone, one that required me to select it over the regular English keyboard, made me think they act principally as pictograms, to use as word replacements – like a lexicon, but not like a rebus. Unable to find any kind of glossary, mainly because meanings applied to particular emoji are reached over time by consensus, rather than being prescribed, I decided I was better off not using anything that could cause confusion or misunderstanding – it is hard enough doing that using English words.

Mind you, I never used emoticons or Wingdings, both intended to add simple pictures to messages like adding a sticker, so I didn’t see the line that led to emoji. Wingdings was hampered by relying on both the sender and receiver having access to the same font, and emoticons were made less clear by having to be read on their side >:/ 8-> >:-( Analgoues to both systems are found in Japan, through kaomoji (“face character”, read in the same direction as text (ˊ•͈ ◡ •͈ˋ) ૮⸝⸝> ̫ <⸝⸝ ა), and in emoji (“picture character”, with no ties to emotion or emoticons).

With the latest Apple mobile system upgrade to iOS 15, I am now seeing emoji suggestions in their predictive text feature, and I cannot disable this feature, let alone the entire emoji keyboard. I know my mother only uses emoji other than a smiley face in text messages to me if they are suggested to her, like the fish that accompanied a mention of the McDonald’s Fillet-O-Fish. My biggest exposure to emoji has been on social media, where they are used to point, promote, and to clap between words to emphasise points being made. If I have ever used one at all, it may have been for effect, but it was too long ago for me to remember, and I can’t see any reason to start now.

Essentially, emoji began like Wingdings, as a proprietary font available only to users of a particular phone in 1997, the SkyWalker DP-211SW from JPhone, now SoftBank. A competitor, NTT DoCoMo, implemented their own emoji across their i-mode platform, beginning the mass usage that culminated in companies like Apple and Google supporting emoji in Japan first, and the need to attach emoji to Unicode, the international text standard, in order for the same images to be seen between different devices. This led to many pictures that existed in Unicode becoming emoji, including those previously added to the standard from Wingdings, Webdings and Zapf Dingbats.

New emoji are added yearly, and Unicode’s emoji proposal guidelines [https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html] are specific in what must be excluded, like logos, exact images, or having meanings that are transient or very specific – openness to interpretation and usage is built into the process. Therefore, when the “Melting Face” emoji was included in Unicode 14.0 and Emoji 14.0 from September 2021, people jumped on it as a symbol for our current times, a kind of sarcasm as things fall apart. Indeed, Jennifer Daniel and Neil Cohn, who conceived it two years before, intended it as a kind of embarrassment, a Western version of when Japanese manga characters turn into paper and float away. It sums up my inability to use such an established communication system perfectly.

YOU BETTER PLAY THAT SAX [6]

I see myself taking up the saxophone at some point. It’s a weird thing for most people to say, but to me, it’s almost inevitable. In fact, this is a warning to my family.

If you liked “The Goon Show,” “The Simpsons,” and David Bowie’s music since childhood, it will have been instilled into you that saxophones are expressive, outrageous, and cool. This is before you even get to jazz, where the objective appears, sometimes, to blow your aching soul through a brass tube.

When Adolphe Sax patented his woodwind instrument a hundred and sixty years ago last Tuesday, they were intended for use in marching bands and orchestras. Sax would later suffer from lip cancer for a five-year period, years before his invention would use the blues to capture that pain.

People have always found ways of getting that bit more out of the saxophone, which changed to suit, its keys moving from the initial oboe-inspired layout to make playing both easier and faster. Its position between conventional brass and woodwind instruments also meant new orchestral pieces could be written using saxophones to blend these sounds together.

As jazz and pop music developed to incorporate its particular sound, the sax was seemingly the “next” instrument to include – once you have your guitars, keyboard and drums, the sax is the next easiest instrument to learn, before you get into the vagaries of finger positioning on the violin, and sorting out your embouchure on a trumpet.

However, you cannot deny that anyone playing a saxophone does look good. You are not stood or sat “behind” the instrument, you can bring it into your body, or hold it out, and its sound is not usually put in the “background” of anything – if you are playing, you are out in front, as people want to hear it.

I know I would have years of practice ahead of me to make all of this sound true, but expressing yourself means you have to start expressing yourself. I shouldn’t mind, however, if all I get to begin are squeaks and squawks, as some people did pretty well out of that.

In a 1983 interview, David Bowie talked about becoming a working musician by playing the saxophone, seeing this as his way out of London, and into America, particularly the 1960s West Coast, Beat Generation counterculture with which he associated the instrument’s sound. However:

“…When I started working with it… I found I didn’t have a very good relationship with the sax and that lasted right the way through. We’re sort of pretty embittered with each other. It lies there waiting for me to touch it. It defies me to... I really have to go through traumas to get anything out of it that anything to do with what I want it to say. So it’s not a steady relationship; it’s not a good one. It really is a love / hate relationship.”

Either Bowie or his sax needed to back off.