Hold up! Before you read this, make sure you read Part 1. It’s entertaining I promise!
RIP Nokia
Sometime around 2006, I finally ditched team Nokia and got myself a Sony Ericsson K800i. Sleek, black exterior, flip-down camera lens, with 3.2 megapixel, ‘Cyber-shot’ camera and inbuilt mp3 capabilities, I thought the K800i looked so cool.
By contemporary standards, the K800i was a great phone. The image quality was amazing for such a small phone, and the screen was large enough to render website pages well, if slowly. I also loved that I didn’t need an additional mp3 player, so it met all of my gadgetry needs in one handy package. (My bank-balance and I, were still resisting the lure of the iPod around this time).
Next up was the BlackBerry Bold 9000. The Blackberry was for the working woman who answered emails on the train and scheduled her diary while getting her hair done.
The Blackberry was the new power player – the 21st century’s answer to shoulder pads, and fast-paced conversations as you walked through the office, unclipping your earrings and ordering your secretary to get that damned Texan, oil baron on the line and put him through to your carphone stat!
Good times were had, especially, once I discovered BlackBerry Messenger (BBM for the uninitiated). Free instant messaging without the need for a computer or a Hotmail account! Aces!
When my BlackBerry Bold 9000’s rollerball refused to roll or slide or simply do anything, I said goodbye to BlackBerry and opted for a proper smartphone. At the time, the most reliable and highly ranked smartphone was actually the HTC Desire.
The HTC Diaries
By 2010, I was bit of a tech junkie. Before upgrading, I looked into phone specs, battery life, inbuilt functions etc. I was obsessed with software issues and bug fixes and how well the mobile OS (operating system) worked in comparison. The iPhone 3 series was too expensive and Nokia just wasn’t cutting the tech mustard anymore. The HTC Desire ticked all of my boxes and was one of the best phones on the markets.
Again, hindsight is a bit*h, but the truth is, I loved the HTC. For about a year. Then the glitches started.
It was a great phone, integrated well with my google accounts and was pleasant to use. However, phone technology moves so fast, that within a year my HTC Desire didn’t stand a chance. Newer, sexier models had been released and already replaced. I was a few generations behind. And my phone was practically obsolete.
Now on 18-month contracts, my upgrades were less frequent, at every 15 months, rather than every 9-10 months. When I finally, got the chance to get a new handset, I opted for the HTC Sensation. You know the saying, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Bingo!
And guess what? The Sensation went the same way my Desire went (doesn’t that sound so naughty?). Only this time, it degraded faster.
The glitches were horrendous, the battery went in less than a day, and the software was a hot mess. The phone very quickly became outdated, and I think this had a lot to do with HTC’s reluctance to upgrade their OS. Everything felt clunky, especially in comparisons to the iPhone 4, which I was using as my work phone.
Team iPhone v Team Android
I miss my iPhone 4. It was smooth, no glitches, and decent battery life. Only 8G of space, but the screen was perfection and the social media integration was lush, As a tweet-a-holic, I HATE that there’s no inline hashtag function on my Samsung S4! It didn’t take me long to adapt to the keyboard, and now I’m ruined for life, because no other keyboard works as well as Apple’s.
So here we are in 2014. I have a Samsung Galaxy S4 Life Companion and I want a divorce! It could have been such a sweet phone if it worked a bit more like an iPhone! Blasphemy you say? I don’t care! Judge me if you will! But, to this day, the best smartphone I have ever used has been the iPhone 4.
The S4’s keyboard is my biggest adversary. I battle typos every day and I can’t stand the predictive text element. It offers the weirdest combination of words and will give you more complicated possibilities than you need. I do like the swipe key function, but then I feel as if only one hand is getting all the action (I swear this post is turning into cellphone double entendre).
My ultra-posh, all singing, all dancing Samsung S4 had all of these mod-cons that either (a) didn’t work or (b) became annoying so I turned them off.
The eye scroll function was one I turned off immediately. The touchless/hover function to turn pages, flip through pictures etc. NEVER worked!
The body feels cheap and fragile, and the casing is weak. The edges chip and the glass screen is at risk of fracturing. This has happened to mine. The phone was in a case, with a protective screen and it still shattered. It’s WEAK! A pitiful excuse for a phone that doesn’t deserve nice things.
My mum also has the S4. Her phone casually calls people when it feels like it and has a tendency to cut her off mid-sentence. I think her phone has ‘life companion’ issues.
What Next?
I would consider buying a refurbished iPhone offline, but as per usual the cost is an issue. I won’t go near the latest HTC One, because that handset acts like its possessed at the best of times/ And, I’m not interested in the Windows phones, because I haven’t been a fan of Microsoft and Internet Explorer since they forced Vista on the world.
Looks like I’ll have to play nice with my Samsung Life Companion S4… for now. Alternatively, I could always go ‘retro’ and dust off my ‘brick’ Nokia 5110, which still works by the way!
PS: I’ve not gone into detailed, technical specifications and reviews of the models because there are already plenty online, written by proper tech-geeks who take phones apart for fun.
Featured Image: ‘2008.11.05 – My life story told by the cellphones I’ve owned‘ by Adrian Clark is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.