Wednesday, March 27, 2013

The story of my experiments with a touchscreen phone

My phone died on me - for the 2nd time. This time I lost it and decided against giving it at the Service Center. I would buy a new phone instead. To tell you the truth, I was getting fed up of its 'Out of Memory' errors and was hoping that it will fail, thus giving me excuse to go for a new model.

When I had bought this phone, my only criterion was that a phone should look different from the pack. Since clamshell phones are out of vogue everywhere, I settled for this phone with a slider - Sony Ericsson Spiro. That was a mistake! I found out later on the net that such memory problems are a norm for this model. By then it was too late!

So this time, I decided to play it safe and conducted a poll with the guys from my software team. The unanimous verdict was 'Go for Samsung'. 'What is your budget?' one of them inquired. '10000 bucks tops' I said confidently. 'Oh come on Madam, it should be at least 15000' said another one who had just spent cool 35k+ on one of the latest ones. 'Nope, 10000 it is. You know I am not a social network type of person. All I will use the phone for is call, SMS, camera, FM, Calendar and Notes. So why do I need to spend extra 5k?'. They all nodded. My absence on their regular haunts like Facebook and Twitter was a continued source of wonder and amusement to them all. A dinosaur, if it were alive today, would have felt exactly the same as me! :-)

It took trips to the neighborhood Croma, Vijay sales and Mobile Store before I could zero in on the model I wanted over the weekend.

Then on Monday, I proudly showed it to the team. 'Way to Go' they all said. What amused me was that almost all of them took it in their hands and beamed. It is so rare to see people feeling so genuinely happy at other person's happiness. Frankly, I was touched.

It was a Herculean task to master the new gadget though. This is my first touchscreen phone and I have realized that I have fat fingers. :-( But that was (and still is!) just one of my problems. It took half a day's tuition, over lunch and tea, of  2 of my team members to teach me how to forward SMS, change my ring tone and put the phone on silent mode without going through an array of menus.

It has been more than 2 weeks since I got the new phone. And I have mastered almost all the functionalities, I think.

But I am yet to find out if I can set more than 4 FM stations on it. Well, there is always another lunch, another teatime session and another one of my teammates :-)

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