Bye Bye BlackBerry.


I think you know the game's nearly up for your current mobile phone when you have to wedge a plectrum into the bottom of it to make it work.

I have a BlackBerry Curve (for those interested in technical detail). It's pretty indispensable; not just for obvious uses, such as texts, calls and email, but also to store ideas and photographs for mine and Glyn's material. Look through most other people's mobile photo albums and you'll find pictures of friends, family and pets; go through mine and you'll find scores of badly-worded signs, odd window displays and amusing screen-grabs I've pulled from the internet.

This is my rather depressing legacy.

What I like most about my BlackBerry is that it has both a touch-screen and a qwerty keyboard - which, for me, offers the best of both worlds. I’ve never wanted to own an iPhone, or any other smartphone with just a touch-screen facility. I may be in a minority, but I’m happy for it.

Sadly, this is becoming less of an option; part of the reason I’ve remained patient with my current handset, as one by one, each of its functions ceased to work.
 
The plectrum trick, incidentally, was discovered by a happy accident. I haven’t been able to make a call for the past few days as, whenever I attempted it, I couldn’t hear the person on the other end.

Now I may be a megalomaniac, but even I understand that a phone conversation can’t be completely one-sided. So I set to work – and after a little fiddle whilst on-line to the speaking clock, I discovered I could make the speaker work by applying pressure to the handset. I carefully wedged a plectrum into a little gap on the side and found that it did the trick perfectly.

This doesn’t stop me looking like a dick when I use it in public.

My mobile has been dropped into the bath twice and onto countless pavements – and until recently it kept going strong. It’s a survivor: like Destiny’s Child (or those men who sang the theme from Rocky). 

However, even I can accept that when you can't make a phone call, it's time to get a new one.


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