You always woke me (and Kapil and Sumit) up in the morning with your lovely voice. I would start my day by looking at you. You were always by my side at any time of the day, or night. You were a worthy companion on all of my trips, be it the jungles of Matheran or the deserts of Jaiselmer. You showed me path when there was no light. You captured moments like there won't be 2nd time. Your playful music helped me through many journeys. You made your presence felt at each and every place, and in each and every heart. But alas, time does change. I knew you were sick when you started requiring more rest time per day. I knew something was amiss when you stopped talking for long hours.
I knew something was wrong when you will frequently require electric charge to revive you up. Since you were so close to my heart, I frantically looked out for transplant options. "They stopped making angels long time ago" was the standard answer I heard in the street. Out of total despair, I even trusted (or pinned my hopes on) a Chinese battery to bring you back. Cost me 250 bucks. Par tum to amar hone ki raah par nikal chuke they. Oh my Sony Ericsson W700i mobile phone, why did it had to happen?And now that you have ditched me, I have bought Motorola Defy smartphone. Cost me 16 grands. It runs on Android 2.2 (Froyo). With you, I never had to worry about anything related to operating system of phone. Infact, I never even cared whether one even existed. But now, I needed to get some basic idea of different operating systems, partly to make sure I'm not buying any outdated stuff. With you, it the only thing I cared about was features like camera and walkman. But now, I needed to think about processor speed, RAM, memory card size, screen pixel and God knows what else. It sometimes felt that I was buying a pretty powerful computer, not just another phone. Frankly speaking, things have become insanely complicated.
This complexity isn't limiting itself to the selection process only. It runs much deeper than that, like a malice or a disease. If the cold war was still on, the Americans would have surely branded it as a Soviet conspiracy to take over the world!!! Think of this. It took my two weekends to understand how this phone works. And still, I often get stumped by something I don't know. I had to google for so many hours for such obvious things. Who would realize that one needs to 'long press' at an item to get an options menu. With my faithful ol' mobile phone, all it required was a simple key press to reveal menu. To switch between recently used apps, I need to 'long press' the Home button. To add to it, I need to frequently kill apps to preserve memory and battery. The list is endless. And there is still more to it. Apparently, I need to install apps from Andriod market for everything...starting from stopwatch cum timer (Ultrachron Lite), music player (MotoPlayer Music), sms (Handcent), kill programs (Advanced task Killer) or browser (Opera). Yeah, I know that all these things are already present by default in a smartphone, but when you spend that big moolah on a phone, u want everything to be sleaky, don't you. You don't want to play music on a player which is cumbersome to browse through. You don't want to use a sms application which uses MMS to send contact card requiring recipient to have data (GPRS/3G) connection to download it.
The suprises kept on coming. I miss the 'torch' of my ol' phone. Yeah it may sound stupid but hey, I have been nearly lost in a pitch dark jungle and trust me, the only two things that you can rely at that time are God and torch. I know it was my fault not to keep an eye for this feature when I bought this phoney phone. Deadly miss I say.
Interestingly, I also realized that you cannot save any draft sms message unless you enter a recipient name. In my old phone, I often used to type random information as sms and save it as draft. But this glitzy smartphone cannot do such a simple thing. So what do I do? Make a guess.... Yes. You are correct. I install another app (ColorNote) just to save my notes. I also could not use my mobile phone as a modem to browse GPRS based internet from my laptop. That used to be my lifeline at places where I had no landline net connection. It wasn't easy but it was doable with my old phone. Here I had to keep on googling to know what was going on. And guess what do I find? Yes. I solve the mystery by installing PdaNet app in my mobile and laptop. So this nice sleek gizmo is a rather app hungry one.
This all was still acceptable. But the straw that broke the camel's back was yet to come. One fine evening, I was returning home and was chatting with another friend of mine. He asked me to transfer one file from my phone to his phone. I quickly browsed to the file and scanned options. No bluetooth option. Hmmm.. I smiled and thought "How stupid of me??" I haven't switched on bluetooth on my phone. So I switch it on and try again. Still nothing in the options menu for Bluetooth. I try for next 20 minutes but still clueless. Finally, after lot of experimenting and googling, I uncover the secret. That my 16k Android phone can send bluetooth files from only few select folders. To get universal bluetooth applicable from all folders on my phone, I need another app from market. I literally pulled my hair. I could do bluetooth almost effortlessly from my old phone. Here I had to install 'Bluetooth File Transfer' app to make it work. That was it for me. After that, whenever something didn't work, I quickly looked up google to find a suitable app rather than trying for hours before installing the app.
The only benefit I have seen uptil now is that of Google maps. It is a pretty handy app, particularly if you are new to the place and looking for directions. I'm sure there will be more benefits. But for now, I'm still searching for the silver lining.
Update: Can now use this smartphone as a torch too...courtesy another app :)
