It’s kind of weird being without a mobile phone. It’s really inconvenient being without my wallet, and while it only took about 10 minutes to cancel my cards and order new ones, I’m not looking forward to having to reapply for the drivers licence and my one-year bus pass.
Not having any way to pay for things is awkward – but it’s the loss of the phone that has thrown me out the most. Weird how you come to rely on stuff like that.
I didn’t have a mobile phone till I got to the UK, and could not, at that time, imagine ever really needing one. There are no media lecturer emergencies in life. But I pretty much run on the handset now. It’s my watch, my portable calendar, contact directory and short messaging service.
I keep an eye on what all my (more techsavvy) friends are up to in real time using Twitter and I send and receive an awful lot of text messages to arrange and rearrange meetings, get alerted to pick up milk on the way home, and learn where Jake is going to be from moment to moment.
Pretty much the only thing I don’t ever use my cameraphone for – is taking pictures and making calls.
Oh, and I hated it too. It was a dumb phone. The reviews were off the hook, but it was on the Windows platform so it crashed all the time, took ages to do anything and had a pointless slide-out keyboard that just added bulk to the device without improving the user interface. I’d have an iPhone in a moment, if only the university wasn’t locked into a deal with a mobile carrier that isn’t on the iPhone menu.
So I find myself reaching for it about every 15 minutes and realising it’s gone, which brings on a weird mix of relief, annoyance and frustration. And every time it happens, I entertain the idea of not replacing it and weaning myself off constant information flow. It would fit nicely into the overall info-diet project I’ve embarked on, but there are some things I still need it for.
Agree about the clunkiness of the phone (am also tied to the same university contract). It takes an age to switch on, needs rebooting from time to time to make it reconnect to the email server and the slide-out keyboard is largely useless.
However, I like having devices that I don’t care about, that I can let get scratched and not worry that somehow I’m ruining it given that it was so deeply flawed in the first place. And it does generally do the email snyching well enough and it tells the time – that’s enough for me.
Sorry to hear that you lost your stuff. Liked the post about the night out in Stourbridge, a town dear to my heart as I covered the 1997 Labour election victory there for BRMB radio. And of course it has the shortest branch line in Europe.
Dave
I don’t know much about blogging, so am curious as to why you have put a link in your blog to “Mobile phone” and “the UK”. Do you get higher up search lists if you have links in your blog?
I have a windows mobile PDA and find it annoying too. I have to reboot regularly (by pulling out the battery) – and when I reboot I find that I have 3 messages and I didn’t get the calls – my phone had ‘hung’. My reminders don’t pop up any more – ever since I visited Singapore. And it gets much worse reception so I lose the call regularly. I’m tempted to get another Nokia phone because I was really impressed with the interface when I last had one.
A paradoxical situation?
I’ve watched your blog(s) evolve, and noticed how you integrate puzzling words like “Twitter” into sentences, forcing me to Google it to understand what on earth you’re on about.
Be it a cellphone, or managing an online Muxtape, or anything else that clutters up your palette in order to fully express yourself. If you can happily work with it, then truth is, we may all be getting to know the full Andrew Dubber.
But is it the real Andrew Dubber?