“I see you finally got your first adult cell phone,” Vero told me when I visited her yesterday. I was busy snap, snap, snapping away with my new Nokia X2, a super sophisticated camera that, very James Bond-like, has been ingeniously disguised as a tiny, lower-end cell phone.

Carla gifted me the X2 on Sunday, and hasn’t been able to get much of my attention since.

“You don’t really need a phone with a camera,” she commented on Monday night. “You need a camera with a phone.”

Oh right. This phone in this camera is real! And so is the great radio! And, hell, I could put my music collection on it if, um, I had a music collection. Hell, it will even play the videos I will load onto it as soon as I expand the memory, which is, um, expandable.

I know I’m a Luddite, but am I really the only one who is surprised that a piece of technology this sophisticated and elegant doesn’t earn the “smart” designation? If this is a dumb phone, I can’t even imagine what kind of cameras you First World People are making calls on.

And, no, I do not have any regrets being 5 or 10 years late to the everyone’s-got-a-camera-in-his-phone party. You see, whenever I have a camera in hand, 1) I can’t seem to stop snap, snap, snapping away with it, 2) I like to take pictures of people at close range, and 3) as a result (and I’m sorry about this, Carla), I sometimes make people a little antsy. Well. . .

It turns out that in 2011, even in the Third World, you can take as many pictures of people as you want, and you can do so as close as you want. Not only do people not mind, thy don’t even notice. They just think you’re on the phone.