I have one annoying problem. The cell phone (W910i) I bought more than 15 months ago can’t (although it should according to adversiting at that time) sync email, calendar, contacts, tasks etc… Or well it can but I have to plug it to my computer, start syncing programme and so on… This has caused me to keep my (paper) calendar since when I go to meetings (not bringing my laptop) I need to write down planned appointments somewhere… Now, I am finally thinking about buying myself a new phone to get rid of this problem and since my old phone is not behavouring that way I want it to do and is much much slower now. Although, despite that one syncing problem it has served me well, I got rid of one more electronic device, my mp3 player. Now I can get rid of my paper-calendar. Seems like we’re in the dematerialization era (in some aspects anyway…). Now the question is to which phone to buy. I’m thinking about iPhone which is quite surprising since I’ve so far rejected all apple products since I don’t like their policy. But iphone seems to have the apps I’m looking for though I have to check how well it connects to outlook exchange servers, if it does at all?
Back to dematerialization. I think not only do we need to dematerialize a lot, I think we want to. So everything that can be dematerialized will sooner or later will be. In fact perhaps it can make (some of) us happier. You see, we have so much clutter all around us, that it accutally is making us unhappy, we cling on to things that aren’t important because we’re afraid to loose it and that part of our history it belongs to. For myself, I would like to get rid of all these keys and cards for a starter. And at the moment I am in the process of digitalizing all of my old photos and the old slides of me and my family growing up. Just to make sure that they’re not lost and to make them more easily accesible to family and friends. This is going very slow though since there’s a lot of photos and slides… my father was a keen photographer to say the least. Another example, is Spotify which I’ve already have mentioned which has caused me to consider to get rid of my cds, at least not buying new ones not even to friends of family who want one. I can just buy them a couple of monts premium subscription and they’re all set.
