We caught up with Andy Rooney, the cranky editorialist from CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Andy had just received a new electronic gadget in the mail. It was a large cellphone with a rotary dial, sent in by a generous viewer who works for a major electronics importer. Here is Rooney’s reaction to his latest gift:

I hate cellphones. They’re tiny, the buttons are too tiny, and there are too many confusing things to think about when operating them. They’re easy to misplace or lose. And who cares about all those new-fangled features? I’ll never send an email or take any pictures. I just want to make phone calls. Isn’t that what a telephone is intended for? I don’t care much for those other things.

A nice viewer sent in this rotary-dial cellphone. People send me all kinds of electronic gizmos, most of which are still sitting in the cardboard boxes they were mailed in. I don’t care much for electronic gizmos. But this device is different. It’s something I can understand and looks like the phones I grew up using. It has a big lighted dial, handy belt clip, and a cord that lets me plug it into a wall jack so I can make calls from a hotel. It runs on AA alkaline batteries that I can buy from Radio Shack. Can your fancy multimedia, email and text-messaging video camera phone do that? I didn’t think so.

I see that my new phone is made in China. I don’t care much for the Chinese. They’re always busy making things smaller, faster, more complicated, with instruction manuals that come in every language but English. You’d think they’d want us Americans to read them, but I guess they don’t. But I give those fellows credit here. They finally came up with something practical that a guy like me can use.

I decided to give this new phone a try. I was walking along a street in mid-town Manhattan yesterday morning, and made a few calls. I noticed that people were staring at me. I don’t care much what people think of me when I’m in public.

I like my new portable phone. It does what a telephone is supposed to do. My bosses at CBS tell me I’m not supposed to do product endorsements like this. I don’t care much what my bosses think. I’ll think I’ll keep this nifty gift.