My old and busted phone
Monday, November 12th, 2007
Yeah, I was pretty proud of that thing. It was coming at the end of my little geekery splurge, what with the laptop, and the big computers, and so I figured I’d need a computer on my belt.
And its done a good job. At, y’know, being a computer.
It does my texty messages nicely, as that’s the needful very frequently, as I don’t like to talk on the phone. Which is a good thing, because boy, as a phone, this thing sucks. People can’t hear me, and I can’t hear people. I often have to put it on speakerphone and hold it up to my ear for it to work.
I’ve checked the volume. I’ve checked the speaker. I’ve got into the settings and tweaked.
See, I think the problem with the bastard is it just doesn’t like being dropped. Unfortunately, I drop things. From pretty high up. Onto all sorts of surfaces:
- concrete
- tile
- asphalt
- wood floors
- urinals (don’t ask)
- grassy knolls
It just doesn’t dig it. The buttons don’t have that nice click, and the battery takes some jiggling to get out.
But I can deal with that, because man, I’m used to broken things. I’ve frequently taken electronics apart, pulled out stripped or broken pieces of plastic, and ghetto engineered a solution that did the job (I’d say the needful, but I already said that once in this post).
No, my problem with this phone, other than the scratches, other than the poor voice quality, other than the… ug.. urinal debacle, is the fact that Windows Mobile just plain sucks. Its sucks big, and it sucks hard. Its dull, its utilitarian, it has no flash, no pizazz. I installed some little third party apps to get a nice little screen on it, with some little clicky tabs and buttons on the touchscreen, but its still blah. Just plain blah.
Today, in news that makes Bos’s tin foil tingle, Google released whats apparently a very beta version of its Mobile phone OS, based on Linux (which’ll make other things for Bos tingle, after his pretty crappy recent experiences with Ubuntu on his new laptop).
It looks pretty. And despite the claims by some that Google is a dangerous entity, in that a) knows what you’re looking for, b) knows what you’re emailing (gmailing), c)knows whats on your desktop (well, many desktops), and now d) knows what you do with your phone, it’s OK.
Because according to this guy, and evidently the American government:
