I’m not sure I understand the urge to “go small” with everything. I recently bought an Insignia 4GB MP3 player, mostly for music and audiobooks. But the thing has about a 1.6-inch screen and is capable of playing videos.

On a 1.6-inch screen? Are you kidding me?

About the smallest I could imagine going is an iPod Touch screen, with features a much larger screen at 3.5-inches… about twice as big… and even that has given me squint-headaches when I’ve seen in-store demos.

I mean, it’s a nice feature and all, but practical? Not really.

It’s the same will text messaging. I like email; I can put it on my 17-inch monitor and puff the text as big as I want to; on the average cell phone, you again have maybe a 1.6-inch screen and keyboards so small, it’s hard not to hit more than one letter at a time with my big, oafy hands.

Smaller is more convenient, sure; and more portable. But, much like a woman wearing a corset, bigger’s not always better.

The days in which I needed to worry about acne treatment are now behind me, but back in those days I remember buying my first typewriter. Growing up in rural Minnesota, I worked my first job picking rocks out of a field on a local farm; I was injured on that job (run over by the rock trailer) and was unable to work much of the rest of the summer, until finally I healed up enough and landed a paper route that I kept for the next several years as my source of income.

The work I did that summer landed me a Smith-Corona electric typewriter and over the next few years I went through a small fortune in ribbons and correction take. As I recall, that Smith-Corona set me back about $249 in 1981 dollars.

Today, I placed an order for the retail version of Microsoft Office 2007 (I’ve been using a 60-day free trial version up till now, that came on my new Acer Aspire). While the package contains the best modern electronic typewriter known to man – Microsoft Word 2007 – it also has Excel and PowerPoint and OneNote in it.

The price paid in 2008 dollars? Only $119 from Newegg.com. What a difference 28 years makes.