Once upon a time, a mobile phone was simply just that. The manual was more like a leaflet and the charger required two people to move it. Sadly those days are gone. The years of technological advancements have stripped away the character and the manner in which we now use the humble mobile phone. How often is it when your contract expires or you just simply want a ‘new’ phone that you utter these immortal words ‘does it have bluetooth, gps,memory cards, can it play mp3 and video and what games and apps does it have?’ Can you ever hear yourself say, ‘whats the talktime and standby mode time???? No, well like me I fall into the former and not the latter. Sadly the ease of use has gone right out of the window. Chaos theory reigns in the form of Nokia Menu’s and Software updates! Yes, software/OS updates/firmware updates.
The nice shiny and yet sometimes awkward to use Nokia N95 is no stranger to all i have mentioned. Talk time is, well, I don’t know, but it does play mp3′s and have bluetooth and all kinds of gadgets and gismo’s. Oh Shit! I forgot the camera…!!! Hmmm, more pixels is good right? Yes it is, but its a phone for christs sake. You want to take decent snaps then buy a digital camera! No! i want my entire life on a 24 month plan and the phone is for free!
Whilst this is true, it aint for free. How much time do you spend messing around on your phone, getting it to look and sound the way you want it? How much time do you spend adding birthdays/deaths and marriages into the nice shiny ‘oh thats useful’ calender? How much time do you spend faffing around backing up your contacts/video/photos/etc? If you were to add up all the times that you spend doing this, you would see that it is not free. Your free time is taken up with a cute, but yet not as small as that previous phone you had.
My nagging doubt about these new phones is that they are getting like PC’s. The more crap you add to a PC, the slower the thing gets, i don’t care if its quad core and has eight of the bloody things, how long does it take to actually get into windows? Same with the phones. Sure it has a 1 gig memory card in there, but before the ‘update’ it was running like a Dell P100 with 8 mb of RAM, compaired to a P4 with a bit more after I had managed to get the update done.
The menu’s have changed and adding a sound file to a ringtone for your chosen victim has changed also. The update took 15 minutes to complete, it wiped everything and I had to start again. I am glad it removed all the contacts from the phone and saved them on the SIM card. For some reason I had all my e-mail addresses sync’d from the other machine and the numbers I had entered. The phone was causing me a headache. I would assign a ringtone to a persons number and when they called…I got the standard tone set to the phone. No matter what i did, it would not use the tone I had chosen. Oh for a right click/properties/tools/format c:/s/u…ahh them were the days. FDISK the shit out of it.
So now the phone is updated, I have now got to go through all my contacts and add them to the Phone contact manager and change their default tone for something I want. I will see how the thing performs since the update, over the next few days, should give me an idea if its going to be a wall feature or remain in one piece. If only the iPhones were here now!
