Text Me.

Is the past ever really the past? I ask this question because I need to upgrade my phone. Obviously there is no clear link between the past and a new phone... I currently have an iPhone 3GS it's old and scratched but realistically there is nothing wrong with it. I've never been much of a talker on the phone, sit and have a cup of coffee with me and I'll talk your ears off but I've never grasped phone calls. So with the innovation of SMS I have my workaround.

As you would imagine because I don't make phone calls and only really text, I have literally thousands of messages. I haven't deleted one since the day I had my phone on 24/02/2010. Before I had this one I had this Sony-Ericsson thing that again met my requirements although it did have a limited amount of space so I had to delete my texts. With my iPhone and its 16GB of memory, I've never had to worry.

It wasn't a conscious decision I made to never delete texts but now that that's the way it is I never want to delete them again. I have come to realise that there is more than a year of my life stored on this phone and I really don't want to lose it. There are messages on here that will make me laugh and reminisce and there are also ones I know will make me sad.

Lots of things have happened to me since I've had this phone, obviously, my life has moved forward. And up, down, left and right and perhaps a little bit backwards if I'm honest. Every single conversation I've had about every single thing that's happened has been stored on this little device and I've never really thought about that until I realised I was due an upgrade.

I know that if I get an iPhone 4 or 4S I can back up the entire contents of my phone and update the new one with all of that. Perfect, that's exactly what I want, but do I want another iPhone? I think I am being converted to the Blackberry world and if that's the case, my data will be non-transferable.

Many of you will not think this is much of an issue I would imagine. They're just messages after all, but they're sentimental at the same time. If you think back to when you got your first phone and try and remember messages from back then I bet you couldn't. I know I can't. And I find that really sad.

Imagine if you could just pick the messages out of your phone and store them on your PC or laptop. Maybe bung them on a USB stick or external hard-drive or something. I genuinely wish that I could look back at some of my old texts and see what kind of rubbish I used to talk about. Now that you're thinking about it, I would wager that you're smiling and thinking about how cool it would be to be able to look back at those little snippets of life. If I had the know how or technical wizardry I would develop a way to be able to do this forever and I would make them into little books.

In the digital age that we live in mobile communication is an ever evolving thing and the number of text messages sent is ever increasing. In 2010 there were 6.1 trillion SMS sent. Yes, trillion, that's 6,100,000,000,000. Just imagine all the things that people have said and continue to say through text message. There will be one word replies that everyone hates like 'Ok' and there will be loving things and meaningful conversations. There'll be hurtful things sent and apologies and condolences. I don't know why I'm explaining what people might say in there messaging, I'm sure you'll have some idea but all those words just get deleted.

The upgrade comes along and all of a sudden it's like you're starting a new book without ever being able to go back and read the old ones. There is no such thing as a meaningless conversation, and I will be keeping hold of my old books to leaf through every now and again.