rhythmaning | A Late Adopter with New Technology (Reply)

As I have said elsewhere, I am a late adopter to most technology: I dislike paying a premium for stuff that is bound to get cheaper, I hate getting v0.1 when everyone knows v2.0 will have all the bugs sorted, and I want to learn from all the mistakes that everyone else has made.

So it was a couple of weeks ago that I actually bought my own mobile phone. I have had a work mobile for five or six years, and I have had my own SIM card which I used to slip into the work mobile on the very rare occasions that I needed my own account. (Very rare: I have a pay-as-you-go account, and in the last year I have spent maybe £10 on it.)

I actually like using a mobile phone, since it allows me to switch the thing off when I want to actually do some work, and it allows me to therefore control who I speak to and when. And because it allows me to wander around the office whilst I am on the phone, or even out of the office so I can chat to people whilst leaning over the railings watching the world go by below. On long calls, I can pace up and down the length of the building, getting some much needed exercise. And if it is a personal or sensitive call, I can prowl around until I can find an empty meeting room where I can then rant to my heart’s desire.

But since I shall be leaving work soon and I have been giving out my personal number to loads of people in the hope that this will get me a job, I thought perhaps I should get my own phone to save me switching between SIM cards the whole time.

(Note to phone designers: why not design a phone that can take multiple SIM cards and allow me to switch between different cards without taking apart the whole bloody phone? And make it cheap, too.)

I didn’t want anything flash – I have enough cameras – just something to make calls and send a few texts. I checked out the internut and saw that the cheapest handsets came in around the £40 mark – sufficient. Then I checked out the captive Vodafone store downstairs from my office. (They got the concession because when the CEO was on a site visit when the building was little more than a pile of bricks, he wanted to make a call on his mobile and he couldn’t get a signal. Back in the office, he got on the blower to the CEO of Vodafone and demanded that they stick a booster in the building so that he – and all his employees with the corporate Vodafone contract – could actually make calls whilst at work. The quid pro quo was that Vodafone demanded a retail outlet. Allegedly.)

They too had handsets at £40 or so, so that was all right, but I didn’t like the feel of buttons. “I don’t like the feel of the buttons,” I told the guy behind the counter.

“Well,” he said, “we have some other phones not on display. How about this one?” He showed me a much nicer phone, with much better buttons.

“How much?” I asked. £25. A bargain. He even transferred all my numbers (there were only about six of the things) onto the new SIM card for me, because since I got my SIM card they have apparently changed the design of the things, and my old card wouldn’t work in my new phone.

Thing is, it is different from old phone in subtle and irritating ways. My work phone is a fliptop Motorola (and yes, I spent many hours pretending to be Captain Kirk), my personal phone is a Nokia – a tiny block, but a block nonetheless. The real difference is in texting: the predictive texting is completely different. I am not a dextrous texter – one, slow character at a time – so predictive texting is essential. The old one would predict whole words from a couple of letters, but the new one goes letter by letter, and won’t help me with any short cuts.

It also doesn’t like a lot of the punctuation I like to use – no semi-colon, for instance. I mean, it is hiding there somewhere, but it doesn’t come running when I need it. I have to use a dash instead. (In case you are wondering, my texts are grammatically perfect. Well, as grammatically perfect as my typing. Which is not very, but I try.)

It doesn’t let me swear, either, which is something I do a fair bit of. So today I was sitting in Pret a Manger texting someone and it wouldn’t let me write “f*cked”. It just refused to recognise the possibility, and made me spell out the word character by character – deeply irritating when I have already keyed all the characters.

But I am otherwise quite taken by my new phone, which is very small, light and fits easily into my pockets.