Thursday 5 March 2009

Whatever Happened To Using Phones Just For Phone Calls?

I like to think of myself as fairly up to date with technology and that I am what is known in the marketing circles as an "Early Adopter". I like to keep up with what's new and buy my Sky HD box in 2006 when it's £299 rather than today when they are advertising them at £49 but, despite having a mobile phone when Orange was still something you made juice with, I can't come to terms with the latest mobile phone technology. Phones developed and grew smaller until Nokia brought out the 63101. It was easy to use, and did everything I needed it to do, was a nice weight and size, was compatible with the car hands free and was,in fact, perfect.

Sadly some phone sales person persuaded someone responsible for our phones here that we would be better off with the latest technology. So now I am lumbered with a phone that has, instead of a key pad, a stupid touch screen the content of which has a habit of going all over the place and has resulted in my accidentally deleting several messages. It has a camera with ten times more pixels than my very first digital camera (again bought donkey's years ago). It has the Internet. It has email. It has games. It has a video camera. It has radio. It has an MP3 player. It has blue tooth. All I want is a bloody phone! When will the phone companies realise that they are just showing off? Anyone over 40 doesn't want all these super douper gizmos and gadgets. We don't want to have to touch a screen with a dainty stylus. And what's more they are giving these things away free. What a total and utter waste of money. I know that this rant makes me sound like a grumpy old man but, calm as I am, I would gladly throw this new phone out of the window. Call this progress?



Nokia Phone vs Samsung Gadget? No contest.



Like Nero who is supposed to have fiddled while Rome burned I wonder if I am blogging while the manufacturing industry around me collapses. The Bank of England has just cut interest rates again but it will mean zero to us at Instanta as we have our fabled "collar" which means our rate goes up as base rate goes down (fortunately this hit its limit last month so the new cut will cost no more). Marion and I got a letter from our mortgage company at home last week saying that they would not be lowering our mortgage rate despite the bank rate cuts so who exactly is benefiting from all these cuts? As far as I can see it is just the banks. I know that my mum and mum in law won't be getting anything on their savings, our mortgage is not going down, our company interest rates have gone up so what exactly is the point?



A big thank you to the NHS for spoiling last night. Marion and I had planned to go for a meal before our trip to see The International at the cinema. Marion had to take her mum to a hospital appointment at 3.30pm for a six monthly check up following a cancer which was successfully removed years ago. Her mum was seen at 6.30pm. Yes, that's a three hour wait for an 83 year old. We have taken Flo to many of these check ups and they are always at least 2 hours late but three hours is just taking the mickey. Oh well we saved the cost of a meal apart from a couple of Tesco ready meal spaghetti dishes which were pretty ghastly. The film was good. An old fashioned espionage type thriller with a brilliant scene at the Guggenheim in New York but I felt that it fizzled out with a weak ending.



My competition is still running and at the moment Craigybacon (above) is the one to beat. He has managed to win an £85,000 game on http://colour.itv.com but I've got a few more contenders who are trying to knock him off his perch and take the £100. You will need to win a £90,000 game to beat him but you can still share with him if you match his £85k. Other names to look out for and beat are lilbeast, magentadevil, xviklfcx, jenuwin, gavinford, debarcle,lfcchampions,josephinegb and lozo.

I'll finish with the perfect solution for my new phone.


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