New School vs. Old School

So my Opa (that’s dutch for Grandpa) and I got Google phones on the same day. I got, as mentioned the HTC Dream, he got the Magic.

That right there is difference #1. I needed a full on QWERTY keyboard. Between txting, surfing, tweeting and everything else I use my phone for, the functionality of the keyboard is vital. For him, not so much. He enjoys the touch screen and the built-in dialer.

Now my Opa ain’t no typical grandpa. He’s the one who taught me most everything I know about computers. Gave me my first one actually, a 486 back in the day… connected to the internet using dialup on a party line, oh those were good times! He’s involved in the development of Moodle, the Open Source (see it runs in the family) classroom management system. Fun fact, he’s actually Moodle2, second person right after the original creator. Opa is the one that excitedly came out from the office one afternoon to show me something he had printed. It was faint, just a sketch really… but it was there. The leaked sketches of a new open source phone.

All that said, he’s still from a different generation. He has a shirt with the words: Just Say No To Facebook, that he quite proudly wears. I’m not sure if he’s ever sent a txt msg in his life, and I’ll bet he probably isn’t too sure what Twitter is.

So what would someone from his generation use the phone for compared to me?

Well if you’ve seen my Google Phone Apps page you’ll see a lot of social networking usage. I tweet, post pics and blogs, keep up on my @protagonize notifications, that sort of thing.

Opa loves the GPS feature (I don’t think I’ve even looked at it). He’s discovered the GPS Treasure Hunt program which I do have to admit looks kind of cool. First thing he did when he got his phone? Downloaded the 100+ page confidential technical manual for it. Don’t ask me how he got ahold of it, I’d have to shoot you

What did I do when I first got my phone? Tweeted it of course! Then while chatting on gTalk with my friends I asked them their fav programs and started searching the Android Market for games and IM apps.

Last time I took a peek at his phone he had eBay bookmarked on the home screen. Mine has my fav programs: gTalk, Twidroid, Meebo and PixelPipe.

So what does this different actually mean? Well, just this I suppose. The functionality of the Google Phone is so huge that two people roughly 50 years apart have found no end of uses for it with very little overlap.