For the last week i’ve been going around in a sort of semi-daze. The hours of the day are spent looking blankly at the wall, or wandering aimlessly from room to room. I rarely eat, and have avoided most human contact. I only showed up for work one day, and only stayed for an hour before i started screaming uncontrollably in terror and had to be taken home. My life is spiralling out of control, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. No one can help me. Only one thing floats through my mind now. Only one thing sits just beyond my periphery…so close but impossible to grasp:

Pocketmail.

It’s hard to even fathom at times just what Pocketmail is. In fact, it may simply be too much to understand. Only those few selected to understand and use Pocketmail regularly can truly get it. I am not one of those people. I was not ready. Now I sit here, a ruined man, to tell you just what I know, and for all of you to stay as far away as possible. Pocketmail is no ordinary gadget. Pocketmail is dementia defined, and forever molded into reality.

Pocketmail at it’s core is just a small clamshell device. It looks harmless. In fact, it looks more like one of those cheap Leapfrog toys you’d get for your kid. The terror begins when you realize that those cheap Leapfrog toys have more functionality than Pocketmail, don’t cost one hundred bucks, AND doesn’t require a monthly fee to operate. The best part? All Pocketmail does is allow you to send and receive email. That’s it. Nothing else. Look at that thing. Look at that thing and realize your friend’s beeper from 1994 had more functionality than Pocketmail does. Good Lord i just pissed myself.

1993 called. They want their gadget back.

Okay, Okay…I can still hear a few voices in my head saying “But what if someone only wants a gadget to send email back and forth?” HAHA! That is a good one, voices! Oh you guys…so ready and willing to perhaps justify this thing in hopes that my sanity returns. Well let me inform you that I agree with you. I don’t mind the idea of a gadget just dedicated to email alone. I can understand that there may be a segment of people who would find that idea just dandy. Even though email is readily available for checking and composing on the most basic of phones and devices since the year 2003, I can still see where someone would be all over Pocketmail. But then you see how Pocketmail works…and everything comes tumbling down.

So to use Pocketmail, you need the device itself. No big deal. You open the device, compose your email, then click send. WAIT, NO. NO YOU DON’T. That would make SENSE! Okay, so you compose your mail, get it all ready…then you pick up the phone. Yes, a phone. You pick up any damn phone you can find, dial your Pocketmail account phone number, STICK THE PHONE UP TO THE POCKETMAIL, and then finally, receive email while your brain explodes out of your eyes from the sheer stupidity of what you just did. Yes, your Pocketmail does not actually have the ability to send email over the airwaves itself. It requires this weird pop-up thing on it’s back to be pushed up to a phone, and then wait for the phone to deliver your email into it somehow. It’s the most amazing and stupid technology I’ve ever heard of all at the same time. Like if you strapped an anti-matter rocket pack to a retarded cat.

WHAT

Let’s not even mention the fact that the phone in the banner picture on their site shows a cell phone more than capable of sending and receiving emails itself. It’s like Pocketmail itself doesn’t get just how stupid it is, and is living in some sort of universe where it sees itself as a useful gadget. I mean, that’s the only explanation I have, especially when you consider this thing is also charging you a monthly fee to use, right? Yes, you have to actually pay out a monthly fee to send and receive email via Pocketmail. Why? Well, that phone number you’re dialing is actually your Pocketmail account number. Think of it as dial-up Internet…except all it does is connect to you Pocketmail and shit email through the receiver at it. Now in the year 2009, how much would you expect to pay for such a service? A service made completely redundant by most every other gadget on the planet at this point? Free you say? Would you believe the basic plan is 59 bucks for 3 months? I just pissed myself again.

Considering all you’ve heard, you have to be asking yourself how any sort of sane person that has any awareness of the world around them would ever use such a thing. How could anyone that hasn’t been locked in some sort of alien time-vacuum need to use such a thing, let alone actually want to give them money every month just to use it? Believe it or not, these people exist, and there are quite the number (Possibly a dozen) of people who are crazy about their Pocketmail. I was going to pull up some testimonials from these people, but Pocketmail must have been aware that I was about to write this review and disabled most of their website. Just let it be known that there are actual people out there that still consider Pocketmail a competitor in the mobile arena. Try not to laugh too hard.

I could go on for a while, as Pocketmail’s site is a treasure trove of comedy even without knowing what the gadget itself is. Including this amazing graphic comparing it to Blackberry phones:

Someone at Pocketmail spent a lot of time coming up with these bulletpoints

Disregarding that those Blackberry phones shown are about ten years old, it’s incredible just to see how far you can stretch the truth in your favor with little check marks. especially this one:

COUNT ME IN

So there you go. Maybe now you can see why this past week has been so difficult for me. Pocketmail is something that just can’t be taken lightly. Maybe if it were an ancient relic from the past, it would be comical at best. But when you realize this thing is still being sold and used, things get much more serious. Pocketmail, for all intents and purposes, is dead fucking serious. And that should scare the living hell out of you.

I know I’ll never be the same.