Tuesday, October 14, 2008

The ultimate feeb-phone

phones-onetouch

I cringe every time one of those Jitterbug cell phone commercials comes on.

Why? Because they presume to target my generation and not the genuinely old people who are their real market - the people in their late 70s and 80s you see in the Life Alert ("I've fallen and I can't get up!") and power chair commercials.

The Jitterbug commercials feature people my age (63) and younger whose adult children are convinced are hopelessly addled and simply cannot cope with a modern cell phone. So these younger-than-me TV actors fondle the phone named for a 1940s dance they've never seen or done and coo about how big the buttons and numbers are, how bright the screen is, how loud and clear the sound is and generally how dirt simple it is.

One woman in the commercial proclaims, "I don't have time to learn how to use a complicated cell phone."

She looks perfectly capable to me and if I didn't know she was just an actress reading a line, I'd be screaming at my TV calling her stupid and lazy.

I went to the Jitterbug website to research this rant and was stunned to find they have a model that doesn't have any number buttons. It's the One Touch (shown above) and it has three buttons - one to have an operator place the call for you, one for a pre-set direct dial number and one for 911.

They don't show you the One Touch on TV. Yet.

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