Cornell is a pretty expensive school.  Four years here costs more than a Ferrari California, with options like Diamond brushed rims and Rosso corsa brake calipers.  Now obviously it’s not fair to compare the Ferrari with good old Big Red.  Your Ivy League degree is likely to last a few million miles without any big issues, while the Italian Stallion would be lucky to last a few thousand.  But what makes Cornell a little bit more expensive is that one piece of equipment every kid seems to need when they go to college, a Smartphone.  Now if it were an iPhone, or even a Droid, I could understand it’s value.  You can play awesome games on the iPhone, and if you don’t have many friends in College, your Droid will always talk to you.  But many of you chose a Blackberry; negating any plausible purpose a Smartphone would have for a college student.  In effect, buying a Blackberry was probably the most idiotic thing you’ve done here at Cornell.  

The Blackberry was designed for one purpose, to be the overlord of corporate slaves everywhere.  If I’m the manager of 16 slaves, how exactly do you expect me to monitor them 24 hours a day?  I could give them all beepers, but then I wouldn’t be able to verbally harass them while adding passive aggressive emoticons to the end. IE: You’re doing a fantastic job today Joe, just wanted to let you know I still don’t have those reports you owe me.  Great to know you actually want to keep your job :-).   The Blackberry revolutionized the way that masters controlled their slaves.  Why would you, a free thinking rebel spirit, ever want to submit yourself to the control of the man?  Haven’t you heard the truth brother; the man is trying to cramp our style!

The new Blackberry Torch, while nice and shiny as compared to their dreary elders, isn't exactly what you’d call high technology.  When you look at an iPhone or the Droid X, you see a slab of kickass silicon.  When you look at the new Blackberry Torch, I see last year’s Blackberry Bold cut into pieces and re-assembled into a slider.  It’s no faster, doesn’t have a better camera, doesn’t have any new apps, and isn’t better at anything other than Email.  A Blackberry that does….nothing more than any other Blackberry has done for the past 4 years.  Revolutionary.  

But at the end of the day the reason so many Cornellians choose a Blackberry is not for the apps, the cool look, or even the geeky features.  So many of you bought a Blackberry for the express purpose of using BBM.  Admittedly, the iPhone and Android don’t have BBM.  It’s the one thing that RIM holds on to, and it’s the one thing that they can advertise.  But, at the end of the day, BBM is nothing more than MMS with the ability to find out if your friend is ignoring you or not.  I know this key feature is the reason many of you are alive right now.  “OMG, BECKY! How could you have not read my BBM yet! I had such juicy gossip about what happened at JOs last night, OMG!”  Just sending a text wouldn’t suffice in this situation.  But you could send of those new fangled emails, they do the pictures and the text!  Gosh-darnit, isn’t that amazing.

You’re attached, I know.  You’re not going to give up that piece of plastic for something made of materials not used in tinker toys.  It’s the same reason you probably wouldn’t trade in your Honda for a Ferrari (if you were logical of course).  At the end of the day, the reason that Blackberries are so popular, and why no Cornellian will go with out one, is simple.  My iPhone is far from perfect.  Sometimes when I hold it to my ear the screen turns on and mutes me.  Seconds later the person I was talking to hangs up.  Sometimes, my iPhone doesn’t make phone calls.  It’s pretty ironic I know.  Blackberries work, all the time.  Though they don’t do anything very complicated, they email, text and make phone calls pretty well.  At the end of the day, isn’t that what a phone is supposed to do?  Smart or not.  So though I will never understand why you want a phone that actually makes calls, I will leave you to enjoy hearing other humans' voices.  My iPhone will keep me company.  It can say “I love you” in 150 languages you know!