After 2½ faithful years my good old T68 mobile phone finally started showing signs of distress last week. Screens froze, buttons took three presses to function and, most distressingly, half my address book made itself invisible. It was time to get a new phone. Pity, because my T68 used to do everything I required of a mobile and no more, and was still in very good physical condition too. I upgraded at the Orange shop on High Holborn (good choice - I appeared to be the only customer of the day), emerging half an hour later clutching a cutting-edge K700i. Plug in, charge up, wait.
Blimey hasn't mobile phone technology moved ahead in the last 2½ years? It's all very impressive, though I have yet to be convinced that any of the new stuff is actually useful. I can now play some very flashy new Java games, except I don't want to play the three arcade nightmares they've given me and I'm already pining for the nice simple Patience on my old phone. I have a narrow selection of ringtones that sound as if they were written by some 80s club singer on his Bontempi organ, and nothing at all that sounds even vaguely like a proper phone ringing. I can download more of all these of course, but at extortionate cost. It seems that what I used to take for granted for free is now an optional extra courtesy of my profiteering phone network. Still, I do now appear to have an FM radio which could be useful, and I've downloaded the old BBC test card for free as my wallpaper so I think I may survive. Now, if only somebody would actually ring me up or send me a text message I could find out how some of the more important features actually work...
