Don’t call me

The short ver­sion: My phone’s dead, so if you want to con­tact me, choose another medium (I would like that any­way, but…you know…)

The slightly longer ver­sion would go some­thing like: I like Nokia phones, I like the Sym­bian stuff. And I’ve never owned a Nokia that wouldn’t self­de­struct, slowly but steadily within about a year. They’re fine for the first few weeks, then they spin into their sui­cide cycle: Every­thing starts to slow down, using the cam­era takes ages, send­ing text mes­sages starts to be a pain etc. etc. Ran­dom shut­down, auto-assigned ran­dom pro­files, gen­eral insta­bil­ity. So I start not trust­ing my phone.

And every time I buy a new one, I think to myself that this is the biggest, most expen­sive phone I’ve ever had. And every time, I feel liked I’m being held beta-hostage at gunpoint.

You wan’t a feature-packed phone? Then pay up and accept that you only get some of them, not at the same time — and you can’t choose what and when your­self. Oh, and the basic phone fea­tures prob­a­bly won’t work.

So I decided to accept that doing a soft­ware upgrade would destroy what­ever I had on the phone, yadi-yadi-da and con­nected to the required PC. But as XP is a use­less piece of where’s-my-driver crap, of course the Nokia soft­ware and/or XP sud­denly encoun­tered cable con­nec­tion trou­ble halfway. Ren­der­ing my phone use­less. Which I had been warned could hap­pen if I myself did soemthing stu­pid along the way. But which of course also is the case if, say, Nokia decide to use, say, Win­dows XP as their pre­ferred way of repair­ing (no, not ‘upgrad­ing’ — _repairing_) their prod­ucts on my time.

Which is more or less like try­ing to fix a bro­ken turd with vomit and forc­ing me to watch for an hour…