Incommunicado
I got me a new phone yesterday.
The old one had been annoying me for a while. Apart from the keys which were too fucking small for my fingers [they were designed for a rat] it started to seriously play up a couple of weeks ago.
It had this little trick of going to sleep about a microsecond after I had last used it, and to wake it up I had to press two keys at the same time. That stopped working. I eventually discovered that I could wake it up by hitting it with a tablespoon. It had to be a tablespoon for some reason. No other spoon would work.
Then a couple of days ago it stopped receiving phone calls. If I tried ringing it from the main phone all I got was me telling myself to leave a message which wasn’t much help.
The poor yoke has never really been the same since I dropped it into a steaming mug of tea over in France a few years ago.
I decided it was time to retire it.
I tried hunting for a similar phone but they all seem to have gone out of fashion. I’m well aware that as soon as a phone leaves the shop it becomes outdated so this was no surprise. However the only phones I could find that had a wee keyboard were the geriatric ones with fucking massive great keys and a huge one in the corner saying “Press this if you want to phone someone”. I may be old but I’m not that old. Or that senile.
I eventually chose one based entirely on technical specifications cost.
I’m not going to say what make or model it is, because I have learned from bitter experience that as soon as I tell, I am derided for choosing that model and I should have gone for the other type. That type of snobbery and one-upmanship just pisses me off and is typical of the modern generation.
It’s a strange yoke. It doesn’t have a keyboard. I know, because I looked. It’s just a blank tablet of black glass. I hunted around and eventually found how to switch it on. It seems I have gotten me one of those irritating phones where you have to flick everything around with your fingertips.
I flicked, slithered and slid and have discovered how to do quite a few things.
I can browse the Interweb using my little network here, which will be very handy if ever all the laptops fail suddenly and simultaneously. I can play games, though I’m still on the first level of Angry Birds. It can tell be exactly where I am on the face of the earth which will be handy if ever I get lost in the village. It even has a copy of Office so I can read any Word documents that I don’t happen to have on the phone. That’s a bit pointless. I can take photographs or films. I can listen to the radio. I can browse YouTube and read my emails. It’s a miracle of modern technology.
The one thing I can’t find is the fucking dial to make a phone call.
I’m sure it’s in there somewhere……
angry birds?? you got an iphone? you should have gotten th….*click*
Hah! The one thing it isn’t is an iPhone!
I’m getting an iPhone at the end of the month.
Don’t try to fool us with talk of dropping your old phone into a bucket of piss, we all know you got a rush of lust for the Samsung Galaxy S3. You could have at least been patriotic to the Euroland and supported Finland and their dying mobile manufacturer. If only Nokia went with Android, they mightn’t be in the shit they find themselves in now. Windows phones, I’m sure they’ll be popular in the long run…
Since you definitely got an Android phone, you will be glad to know that there are plenty of rotary dial apps to download from Google Play.
Jayzus! I just looked up iPhones on sale in Ireland. SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FUCKING YOYOS????? Fuck me! You could buy two good laptops for that.
So telepathy doesn’t work in Eire then!
Hah! I knew you were going to say that.
I’ve just got myself an iPhone 3GS for £18/month. Not the latest, but it seemed like a good deal until I tried using it to send texts/emails. Fucking touch screen is getting me down, but I old phone as a big black blob in the middle of the screen so I had to get a new one. Used to be that you could get things repaired, but it’s all throw away these days.
Off topic slightly, but they told us on BBC news this morning that Nokia had layed of 14,000 workers. My immediate thought was that Gordon Brown must be ab(-using) iPhones instead now.
Oops! Too many typos:
“but I old phone as a big ” = “but my old phone has”
“layed” = “laid”
GD, maybe you need an app to make phone calls. Heh!
FFS Slab don’t confuse him even more!
GD, Here’s two buttons that might help. Pete thinks I’m trying to confuse you. These might help
http://static3.depositphotos.com/1000347/156/v/950/depositphotos_1564893-Buttons-with-a-telephone.jpg
I’m guessing my latest comment got gobbled up by the spam catcher. I might just send you comments by snail-mail or something instead.
GammaG – Indeed you were trapped by my spam thingy. The Samsung Galaxy x3? Never heard of it, but I looked up the Samsung lot…. fuck all change out of €600. That’s 150 pints of stout and counting. Feck off.
Sean – You actually got a mortgage out for your phone? £18 a month over how many years?
Slab – So you reckon that I need to download an application so that I can use my phone as a phone? I suppose it makes as much sense as anything else in this crazy world. My yoke doesn’t have any buttons that look like the ones in your link. It doesn’t really have any buttons at all, which doesn’t help.
Please note everyone – the word is APPLICATION. “APP” is just a sign of laziness and a “dumbed down” mind.
There are very few apps that garner enough respect to be called an application.
Just call the bad ones junk.
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=grandad&c=apps 😛
Oh for fuck’s sake!! And not one of them asked my permission.
€600 for a phone? That’s daylight robbery! I’m sticking with my old Nokia…
Got myself a pay as you go Blackberry Curve last week for 99 euros. Avery steep learning curve indeed.
Nokia Lumia, isn’t it? 🙂 Have fun fiddling around with it. You’ll get used to the system in a couple days.
Wow GD you sound pretty hi-tech to me.
“Himself” had to buy a new mobile a few years ago (he put it in the washing machine AND the dryer….don’t ask!) and got very confused. He didn’t want to do all the clever stuff, he just wanted to phone people. The last straw was when the spotty youth serving him asked if he wanted wireless? As, to him, wireless is a big bakelite box with knobs where you can receive Hilversum he lost the plot!!
The grandchildren must be wired differently, they’re not quite 3 and they can manage both the iphone and the ipad perfectly, in fact one of them has worked out how to buy things from the Apple Store! I can see problems ahead.
Welcome Theatre Virgin! I confess I got a bit weak at the knees when I saw the prices. €600 was by no means the most expensive. I got away with a tenth of that though. 😉
InisEanna – Aren’t they the ones with a full keyboard on them? I need a phone to make phone calls, not type a letter.
Welcome Lorant! This is the fourth mobile I have ever owned. The last three were Nokias, but I thought I would go to a different baker this time. There was a reason why I went with Nokia in the past but that reason no longer exists so it was time for fresh fields.
Meltemian – It’s very easy to put these damned phones through a washing machine. If they had some decent cables attached to them, a lot fewer would go through the Long Rinse Cycle? Our Puppychild asked to borrow my phone a couple of weeks ago. I asked why and she said she wanted to play games on it. I told her there weren’t any games and that stumped her completely. How could a telephone not have games?!
Hi GD,
Two year contract includes 100min/month, 10Gb download/month and unlimited texts. More than I will ever need! Seemed a reasonable deal for £432. Have I been done?
Sean – On;y you can say whether you have been done or not. I don’t use my phone much so I go with a prepay plan. I doubt I would use 100 min in a year, so if I got that plan I definitely would have had a bad deal. On average, I would probably spend less than €100 a year.
I know the feeling! I just bought an IPhone and it is driving me mad, the touch type is hard to get used to and I don’t know half of what it does. Only thing is my daughter-in-law and grandson have one and can help, I hope. Does anyone know how to clear our all the email? everything from my virgin email has been transferred and since I use outlook express that means literally thousands and I only seem to be able to delete one at a time.
Carol[42] – I have discovered a little quirk of my yoke… if I hold the phone sideways the whole screen twiddles around. Seeing as the screen is now wider than it is high, I get a wider, and therefore slightly bigger keyboard. And I have the opposite problem. I found a button and pressed it, and everything vanished. Bugger!
I have been told that they only hold the emails for 30 days so maybe they will vanish one day! my problem with the keyboard is that my nails are long which makes it difficult to use my finger pads. I could cut them of course but I don’t want to, still it does have a great camera.
If you’re used to using a T9 styled 0-9 keypad, like on the good old phones, you can download an *application* to change the keyboard on your Android phone. That’s what I’ve done. It’s the only way I can type text my my phone at any kind of speed.
Carol – I think the 30 day thing may depend on the way the mail is set up. I wouldn’t worry though – if your mail causes all the servers in the UK to crash, they’ll probably clear the mails out for you? Long nails can be a bugger all right. I used to have them on my right hand, but not the left. The perils of being a guitarist!
GammaG – Thank you for conforming to the general rules of spelling that pertain at this time. My yoke does have a Qwerty keyboard [I had to check the spelling there] which pops up on the screen but seeing as the screen is about half an inch wide, the keys are quite small. As I said in my original brainfart – all phones seemed to be designed for a rat.