Recently my fancy-shmancy Samsung android phone had a nervous breakdown. The display committed suicide and I was left with a phone that worked perfectly, except that i could do nothing with the screen. This would have been alright to deal with if my phone wasn’t a touch phone. That’s right. It was completely useless. As it is being fixed up by the Samsung doctors, I have to temporarily revert back to using my old HP phone. I thought this would be very difficult indeed.
With the advent of the new series of Operating systems for mobile phones, a lot of changes took place too. Gone were the days when we had to wait for ages for a page to load by using edge; just use wi-fi. No more complicated methods of configuring e-mail, just use it as you would on a normal web browser. Hell, you could even have a normal web browser on your tiny cell phone! All this was achieved by the new operating systems and they took over the market since they were inexpensive. Android, Blackberry and iPhone operating systems now dominate the market.
My android phone is brilliant! It was one of the first Samsung phones to get the android OS. It has everything that I could ever need, all in one teeny tiny cell phone. A physical QWERTY keypad for my incessant texting, wi-fi so that I could visit facebook on the go, games to entertain me at all times, a bunch of random applications for my amusement, and a touch interface to boot! When I realized I would be deprived of all this for a few weeks, I was heartbroken. I have to use a basic HP iPAQ messenger phone now and honestly, it isn’t that bad.
I’m surprised at how competent this phone has proved to be. It has wi-fi, a decent alphanumeric keypad, a decent music player (windows media player, in fact) and an amazing battery life. Sure it doesn’t have a great camera or an app store but who really needs them anyway? Access to wi-fi is enough to keep anyone occupied. And even though my incessant texting is a bit slower than usual due to the keypad, the great battery life makes up for it. This phone has worked flawlessly since 2008, quite amazing in today’s world. My Samsung barely made it through one year, let alone four!
It’s nice to notice how far we’ve come in the age of electronics but maybe we need to go back to basics to take things a step further. An old phone showed me that we’ve come a long way but also have a lot of ground to cover up. Software has seen an obvious improvement, while hardware has taken a step backward. I cant wait to see my Samsung again but I can get by with an old HP just fine.
