Monday, October 29, 2007

T-Mobile Has a More Biblical Phone


Today T-Mobile unveiled their newest entry into the specialty phone market, called Shadow. It has a big screen that slides up to reveal a key pad and has software with eye-catching graphics. According to Chief Executive Robert Dotson any similarities or comparisons with Apple’s new iPhone end there.

Shadow has a 20 key pad like a Blackberry but is touted to be more fun. The screen features a string of icons. The first one is a link to myFaves where pictures of your favorite people stare at you. A scroll wheel allows you to toggle among the icons.

There’s a full web browser, Wi-Fi, a 2-megapixal camera capable of taking video and a music player. It can sync with Microsoft Outlook and has stereo Bluetooth.

So, if you’ve read this far you’re thinking, “What do you mean that the phone is more biblical?” Dotson grabbed my attention when he said that the iPhone is “a great product…but it is an experience built around me. It’s a self-indulgent product where I can sit down and have all the experiences that are important to me.”

Instead, he said, the Shadow is about the people who are most important in your lives. “It’s a we-, it’s an us- phone.”

If there is anything that has defined and described American life in recent decades, especially the Boomer generation, it has been the never ending focus on “me”. If there is a key word that describes the life of a Christ-follower it is “we”.

Becoming a Christian is not only about my giving my ultimate allegiance to Christ but that I express that allegiance by loving others well. Loving others is most often expressed in highly committed, deeply substantive relationships that the Bible calls “community”. The life transformation that God is at work to do in Christians cannot happen without “we”.

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