When I was thirteen, I got my first Tandy 1000 HX PC with 640 KB. It ran at an astonishing 4.77 Mhz.

I think I may have said something like:

I can't believe they still make PCs without 720kb floppy drives!

I wish he had said something like "I can't believe people still buy cell phone cameras that require them to use the cellular data network to get to the picture." Then we might actually be getting somewhere. Lock-in only happens when you let it.

My cell phone has a camera, and I can count the times I've used it on one hand. Cameras in phones suck, and it's a pain to get them off (I'm not stuck using the cellular data network... but bluetooth isn't exactly speedy).

I had a POS 3 year old phone without a color screen (!) let alone a camera up until about 4 months ago. 99.999% of the time, I use my phone for calling. The major reason I got a new phone (besides snide comments from friends and co-workers) was for bluetooth, so I could get a bluetooth headset. Now that thing I use several times a week, sometimes as often as a couple times a day.

I can't believe it's so difficult to buy a simple mobile phone.

No weighty, bulky, unwanted camera. No picture messages. No frigging games. No MIDI ring tones. No unhelpful word "completion" when I key in a message.

I can't believe they're still selling phones that are as heavy, bulky, and even more gizmo-encrusted as the ones three years ago.

Take heart; there is an emerging category of so-called 'voice-centric' phones, meaning smallish, cheapish phones with biggish buttons and few features beyond making phone calls and texting (SMS). They don't get much publicity, though...

You certainly don't _need_ any of those features in a phone but once you have a camera at your disposal, you start looking at the world in a different way. Then once you start sending those pictures to other people, it is just more richness in the communication stream you have with your friends/relatives and colleagues. As for not liking word completion in the phone, I can't offer any suggestions there except for try a different vendor's technology. The T9 stuff in my Nokia phone is wonderful.