Obama speaks on a cellphone on board a plane in Washington. (AFP)

Washington, Nov. 16: Sorry, Mr President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.

Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.

For years, like legions of other professionals, Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.

“How about that?” Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory email message on the night of his victory.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about email security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas.

A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first emailing President, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the President, the chief executive of the US is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive.

Diana Owen, who leads the American Studies programme at Georgetown University, said Presidents were not advised to use email because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.

“They could come up with some bullet-proof way of protecting his email and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked,” said Owen, who has studied how Presidents communicate in the Internet era. “The nature of the President’s job is that others can use email for him.”

She added: “It’s a time burner. It might be easier for him to say, ‘I can’t be on email.’”

Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American President to do so.

Obama has not sent a farewell dispatch from the personal email account he uses — he has not changed his address in years — but friends say the frequency of correspondence has diminished. In recent days, though, he has been seen typing his thoughts on transition matters and other items on his BlackBerry, bypassing, at least temporarily, the bureaucracy that is quickly encircling him.

A year ago, when many Democratic contributors and other observers were worried about his prospects against Senator Hillary Clinton, they reached out to him directly.

Obama had changed his cellphone number, so email remained the most reliable way of communicating directly with him.

Obama is the second President to grapple with the idea of this self-imposed isolation.

Three days before his first inauguration, President George W. Bush sent a message to 42 friends and relatives that explained his predicament.

“Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace,” Bush wrote from his old address, G94B@aol.com. “This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.”

But in the interceding eight years, as BlackBerrys have become ubiquitous — and often less intrusive than a telephone, the volume of email has multiplied and the role of technology has matured.

Obama’s memorandums and briefing books were seldom printed out and delivered to his house or hotel room, aides said. They were simply sent to his BlackBerry for his review.

His messages to advisers and friends, they say, are generally crisp, properly spelled and free of symbols or emoticons. The time stamps provided a window into how much he was sleeping on a given night, with messages often being sent to staff members at 1am or as late as 3am if he was working on an important speech.