The Static PageThe Static Page
main pagelatest static pagearchives
I'm going to to go get a new mobile phone tomorrow. This wasn't intentional, but that's the cheapest and longest lasting choice.
My current phone one, a Sony Ericsson K700i, is less than 18 months old and it's not functioning right anymore. Which sucks. I freely admit that it was I who made it actually unusable: up until the other day, the joystick thingy was unreliable and hard to use. So much so that I learnt a lot of key shortcuts so I didn't need the joystick. :-) However a colleague found some slightly dodgy instructions on the web about how to clean the joystick contacts for a K750i, so I set about doing the same for mine. Unfortunately, I brokes the traces on the flexible circuit board for the keypad. And do you think I could get a replacement part for it? The phone is not even two years old (I found a manufacturing date inside it!) and repairs seem to be an afterthought. I'm not impressed.
It's not that I hugely mind getting a new phone: it's just that I was happy with the K700i and wasn't ready to consider replacing it. The previous one, a T300, was a bit limited in ways I hadn't foreseen when I bought it. Plus it's joystick wore out (that sounds familiar). What I object to is the constant 'upgrade now' mentality of the industry. And the manufacturers have reacted - notice I said reacted and not responded - with phones that wear out in a few years. By contrast, my first phone would still be going strong except that technology has moved on. It's an Ericsson GH388 and would be classed as a 1G GSM phone. That's First Generation. It makes and receives calls and text messages. It doesn't understand pictures, or WAP or GPRS. It doesn't have custom ringtones, let along polyphonic or even MP3 ringtones. It doesn't even have predictive text! But it still goes.
I guess making them less robust has made them cheaper and this puts modern technologies in the grasp of more people (is that a good thing? It might not be...). But it creates more waste, too. At least my K700 is new enough that I could conceivably sell it on Ebay for parts. There might be someone interested, I guess.
Wade aka Static
Comments? Email me at static dash page at yceran dot org.
