When I finally stepped up the cell phone ladder to my lavender BlackBerry I realized that I had wasted too many years with a plain old cell phone.  However, over the last few years  I covertly used my BlackBerry in public.  I didn’t want to look like some stubborn, technology-ignorant senior citizen.   Wait! I must reclaim that comment as I flashback to my bestie, EP (a cool guy in his 80s), when we had a lunch date and he stood in front the restaurant so über hip whisking away on his new touch screen iPhone. But my phone was smart.  Just not as smart.

And because I’m kind of cheap (frugal?), I skimped on my phone’s camera quality. My Olympus digital camera works just fine, thank you very much.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world can point their smarty-pants phones at the night sky and tell me exactly what constellation is overhead; they can create Hollywood quality films with their smart-alecky phones (something I can’t even do on my smart-alecky computer); and  so on and so forth.

But if anyone thought that I would ever give up my keyboard on my phone for a virtual keyboard, their smart phone are smarter.

I have faith in technology.  I believe in competition.

Yesterday I raised my lavender not-so-smart phone in the air and saluted Thorsten Heins and Research in Motion.  “RIM – now called BlackBerry after its signature smartphones – officially unveiled its long-delayed BlackBerry 10 devices on Wednesday, which feature a better camera, faster browser, thousands of available apps and other new features,” reported the New York Daily News.

“… the company debuted the Z10, a touch-screen device… It also showed off its Q10, which maintains the BlackBerry’s traditional physical keyboard.”    (My highlights.)

PC Magazine even likes it.  Here’s the buzz:  “RIM made sure to parallel a lot of the Z10’s features here. You still get MicroUSB and MicroHDMI ports on the left, a volume rocker on the right, a MicroSD card slot and a removable battery. The phone’s back is soft-touch rather than shiny, made of a durable ‘woven glass’ material. The 8-megapixel main camera, 1.5-GHz dual-core processor, 2-megapixel front camera, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage all parallel the Z10, as well. So the Q10 should work just as smoothly as the Z10, just with a keyboard.

“The most important thing about the Q10, of course, is the keyboard. Yes, the keyboard is Bold-quality. I checked it out right next to some existing keyboarded BlackBerrys, in fact. The keys are 30 percent bigger than the Bold’s on the edges of the panel, with larger frets between the rows to prevent mis-typing.”  The Q-10 debuts this April.

April cannot call me fast enough. And I hope they are purple.