Always, always online

Everyone in my household and everyone on my Yahoo! Instant Messenger list can attest to the fact that I am always, always online. Despite all the trouble it’s caused over the years, I can’t help but love the Internet. I stop functioning when I am more than 10 feet from my computer.

This makes it difficult to leave home for weekends out of town; I don’t bring a laptop with me. How do geeks like me survive outside our natural habitat? As excited as I get about going on three-week vacations to beautiful places, there is still a nagging thought in the back of my mind reminding me that I might not have access to a computer. I hate knowing that I might be missing out on the epic drama that only the Internet can provide.

But other than scandal after scandal and its incredible ability to connect people, what I love about the Internet, and just cannot do without, is the way it continues to expose me to new music from the Philippines and the rest of the world.

Just the other day, I heard a song by Franco Reyes (Cast Away, if you’re curious) that I fell in love with because my friend streamed it on our group blog. I have friends who send me their works in progress through my e-mail; others send me songs off upcoming albums. I keep track of what’s making waves in international music, what people all over the world love, through the Hype Machine. I love music, and I love that I discover more of it every day because of the Internet.

So you see, it’s nearly impossible to tear myself away. I just cannot be without an Internet connection, but I also don’t want to have to carry a laptop around everywhere I go. So what’s my solution?

Mobile phones, apparently.

When I got my first phone in 2001, it was a heavy little thing, backlit in acid green. All I could do with it was call my mother, text my friends (in very tragic text lingo, which I will probably never forgive myself for) and play Snake.  Harmonic ringtones were nonexistent; polyphonic ringtones were a distant dream. And if you wanted custom ringtones, you had to compose your own in an application called “Composer,” one note at a time, three octaves only. You could barely fit the chorus of a song in there.

Over the years, as the technology developed, phone features improved. Screens were colored, ringtones started to sound like actual instruments, and you could access a limited number of websites through WAP.

Nowadays, phones are no longer mere phones. They’ve become all-in-one multimedia tools with Internet/Wi-Fi access, and they have taken the concept of connectivity to an all-new level of awesome. I can say this honestly because I have a Nokia E63 in my pocket, and I am literally never away from the Internet now. I carry the Internet around with me in a sleek business phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. (It has enabled me to hang out with real people again! Is that sunshine I see?) Perhaps my favorite thing about the E63 and its functionality is that I have my Gmail account synced to it. This might not be particularly amazing to people who only use e-mail for, well, e-mail, but for the denizens of the Internet, the possibilities of e-mail are endless.

When I get my e-mail on time, no matter where I am it completes me. If people in the past thought texting was what life was all about, they were right, then. Today, with the Nokia E63 the future is here. Sure, I can text when I have to. But, staying connected, and not having to stop by one of those Internet places to check my e-mail is great. I know that the nifty Nokie E63 will never make me miss an e-mail again.

I mentioned earlier that several friends and I were running a group blog. It’s a week-old group blog on Tumblr, celebrating Pinoy music — we post pictures, stream audio, put up event posters, and stream music videos from YouTube. All of these things can be done through e-mail now, which means that because my e-mail is synced so seamlessly with my phone, I can do all these things with the E63.

I could be at Saguijo during a spontaneous Eraserheads reunion set (we wish!), and within a few minutes, I could have taken any number of pictures with the phone’s built-in camera and e-mailed them to the blog — almost in real time. With the amount of memory in the E63’s Micro SD card, I could take up to an hour of video and then promptly e-mail it to YouTube. (Yes, you can e-mail to YouTube, too.) Who cares all that much about the lower resolution when you’re witnessing history?

Even better, the display is crisp and clear, so browsing websites (in miniature, compared to your standard computer screen, of course) is a visual treat. I spent hours watching videos on YouTube on the E63 just because I could. That I had access to that much information and entertainment through such a light gadget was just amazing.

Nokia phones have been able to stream FM radio for quite a while now, but this function never gets old for me. So few of us listen to the radio outside our cars nowadays. I really appreciated that I could listen to the radio on my phone, because it enabled me to catch my radio debut on NU107 — “singing” backup vocals with friends on the new Chicosci song, Diamond Shotgun. I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of looking for a working radio in the house — I would have missed it if I didn’t have the E63 with me.

I also had a really good time with the phone’s Internet Radio application. I curled up on my couch one afternoon and just sifted through radio stations from all over the world, listening to what they were listening to. (Yes, there was a lot of Michael Jackson.) There were stations being run by various American universities, even a couple of Iranian stations playing traditional Persian music. There were stations from countries with unfamiliar names that I knew absolutely nothing about. The E63 provided me with a lovely little window into foreign culture.

It’s always been incredible to me how technology continues to enable us to pursue our passions more easily. Phones have come a long way since my Nokia 3210. Now, I can call my mom, send my friends properly spelled and capitalized text messages, and celebrate my love for music. It is so much better than 2001.