↓
 

Upgrade my arse

Head Rambles Posted on by

I am the not-so-proud owner of a "smart phone".

I am presuming it's classed as such as it's just a slab of glass and metal and has no numbers to press.  It does have the facility to browse the Interweb and do various weird things like act as a torch or a camera, which seems a little pointless as I have several torches and a reasonably good camera anyway.

One of the [many] things that pissed me off about it was that it was incredibly slow and cumbersome.  I like to pick up a phone, dial a number and listen for the ring-tone.   My yoke however requires a password to get into it and then it would start doing strange and fancy things before I could even reach the keypad to type the number.

I read somewhere that I could download something to make it go faster, so I downloaded it.

Then whenever I even picked up the phone it would flash panicky messages saying its memory was full and I too many things running.  I had tell it to clean all the shit out just to shut the fucking thing up.  The strange thing is that the next time I tried to use the phone I would have to go through the whole procedure all over again.  Where the fuck had all this shit come from?  I had everything disabled such as Interweb access and Data Transfer [whatever that is] and Bluetooth so how come it has managed to restart several programmes and fill my thing with crap again?  Who restarted those programmes?  Why have I suddenly got hundreds of megabytes of crud filling up the yoke?

I tried inserting one of those card things so it could have somewhere to store its junk. but it tells me that the ony things I can store on the card are music and photographs.  Fucking useless.

I tried installing another programme to stop other programmes starting.  That didn't work because my original programme just complained that the new programme was creating even more shit.

The other day I really got pissed off with the constant alerts and warnings that my death was imminent, and I removed everything, leaving the phone with the bare minimum.

The phone doesn't complain any more.  Even better, it's a lot faster.  In fact it's so fast I can even answer a call before the other person gets bored and disconnects.

I got a text this morning.  My service provider wants to know if I want to "upgrade".  For a mere eighty smackers, I can have a brand spanking new phone.  Why?  Why the blind fuck would I want to shell out eighty notes to buy something that merely does what my existing one does?

When I was a kid, we had a heavy old Bakelite phone out in the hall [we were posh!].  The flex was always tangling and if you dialed a long number your finger got sore from spinning the dial.  Over the many years it worked, and worked well.

I don't ever remember the parents getting a message asking if they wanted to upgrade it?

 

Comments

Upgrade my arse — 4 Comments

  1. Ah, the good old days of Bakelite phones! Our first phone didn't even have a dial – you had to pick it up and wait for the operator to answer, and tell her (it was always a her) the number you wanted, and she'd connect you. It did have a nifty little drawer at the bottom with a card that you could write important numbers on, though! There were no area codes either. Our phone number was the name of the town we lived plus three digits. Which goes to show how many phones there were in our town!

    Smart phones are an odd one. I quite like some of the functions that are available to me now, like for instance if I can pick up a WiFi signal where I am, I can make free international calls via Viber. Also, when I'm in Patras, I can use it as a WiFi hotspot, and it connects to my laptop and gives me internet fast enough to stream motor racing live. The camera is handy too, because although I have a good camera, it's not something I can put in my pocket, whereas the phone tends to be with me all the time, and with the work I do, I take a lot of pics of aspects of a job for further perusal at home. On the other hand, they do seem to have a mind of their own, which is sometimes frustrating. I have a bit of software that is an antivirus, but which also cleans out the cache on a regular basis and monitors what the various applications are doing unnecessarily. It still has brainstorms now and again, though (well, it is a computer), in which case a re-boot usually sorts it out.

    • Indeed I remember the UK system.  I had an uncle on the West Wratting exchange, which I see now is prefix 01223 – not quite so romantic?  And who can forget the radio news where every report of a crime asked us to call Scotland Yard at Whitehall 1212?

      I tend to use my phone as a reminder for events and as an alarm clock.  I also have a birthday reminder which is handy.  Apart from that it's just a phone!  There are precious few hotspots around here, or for that matter anywhere I tend to go, so the Interweb thing doesn't get that much use.  As a phone though, it's grand.  My only problem with that is keeping track of the vast array of numbers that are stored, especially as at one stage it somehow sucked in all my Farcebook contacts!

  2. Now I'm not as old as you geezers but I do remember our phone number being Kingswood 5-9443.  I can also remember having to call the operator to make a long distance call.  She would call you back when there was a line open.  I too have a smart phone now.  An Apple iPhone6 no less.  I love it.  I was at a gun store the other day and someone mentioned that movie with Robert Redford wherein he worked for the CIA but noone could remember the name of the flick.  Out pops the iPhone and a minute later I says, "Three days of the Condor".

Hosted by Curratech Blog Hosting
↑