a reply to:
grainofsand
Well that is precisely the problem with those newfangled jobbies! Apart from the fact that everyone I know who has owned a smartphone, has had
trouble operating the damned things as a telephone, they are too weak to stand up to hard graft, and I like to get stuck in.
I am a locksmith, and an awful lot of my work involves drilling metal, cutting metal, having to apply force in a very particular way, and there are
just too many things about what I do during a day, that could potentially ruin one of these modern doodads. I also have a Nokia thing, and although it
is not OLD in chronological terms, the design is rather ancient, and you can indeed bounce it off a wall, kick it across a room, fall on the pocket it
is contained in, drop it, drop things on it, and it does not care! I paid twenty pounds for it, and got a ten pound airtime credit with it.
Compare that with a buddy of mine, who went out and bought the latest iPhone, something like six hundred pounds worth of phone or something stupid
like that, dropped it from a height of next to sod all feet, and the "toughened" screen cracked in such a way as to make the entire thing utterly
unreadable, and indeed, impossible to use. We do not get much by way of work from bailiffs, mostly because we tend to disagree with private companies
having the right to enter property at the instruction of anyone but the resident. However, when we DO go on a call out to a bailiff related job, I
want to know that even if the worst happens on the job, I can reach into my pocket, and get a shout out to the police, ambulance, fire service, or at
least our base of operations!
With a handy dandy simple phone, I can do these things and be confident in doing so. The other thing that worries me about the modern phones, is that
they spend so much of their power and time doing software updates and God alone knows what else, that some of them are just really awful at being a
telephone.
Now, we all know, because the advertisements are often relentless, that some of these newfangled gadgets are coming out with cameras which are better
than my old 10.2 megapixel compact camera, and I think that is wonderful. But until they marry that to a handset that can survive being pummeled with
bricks, and preferably costing less than a months pay to buy without a contract, I am certainly never going to get one.
Now, the reason I go to length to describe these things, is that I also like to go for long walks. I can often be found trekking to town down the
coast road, or bumbling around the woods and countryside areas just out of town. I have been known to cover twenty kilometers just going for a stroll,
and again, these are not environs which lend themselves to use of technology which has not been hardened for real life, and yet, being out and about
in the manner I describe is the sort of lifestyle choice which is more likely to bring a person into visual contact with something extraordinary!