My BenQ phone recently bit the dust after just one year. It is warrantied, so I sent it in for repairs, but I desperately needed something in the meantime so I bought a low-end Nokia. All I want a phone for is talking, not playing video games or downloading ringtones and pictures of Ijima Ai.
After looking at what was available, I bought a Nokia 3100, which is considered a minimalist phone by today’s bloated standards. It’s not totally minimalist - you can in fact play games and download photos, ringtones and viruses, but compared to other machines on the market, it’s feature set is pretty small. Plus the phone is small in size, battery life is good, and most importantly it’s cheap.
So am I happy? Not very. The biggest flaw is the difficulty of changing the battery. I could replace the battery in the BenQ is less than 5 seconds - I’d be lucky to complete this traumatic operation on the Nokia in less than 5 minutes. There is no way to get a grip on the battery, other than maybe beating on it with a rock. The engineers who designed this must have thought they were being funny - I think they should be tried as war criminals.
To add insult to injury, when you finally get the battery replaced, the time/date disappears. Seems like they didn’t bother to include a capacitor to keep the time settings during the interlude when the battery is absent (but other settings seem to remain intact).
Another boneheaded feature is that the time and date aren’t displayed in the default screen (as is the case with virtually every other phone on the market). So if you want to know the time and date, you’ve got to wade through some menus to find it. I guess they didn’t want to clutter up the screen and deface that photo of Ijima Ai.
I’m also not real pleased with that bulky connector for the earphones, which seems to be Nokia’s standard. Motorola has got this right, using a small pinhole sort of connector.
Basically, it seems like nobody designs a phone that I really like. Why don’t these engineers consult with me first? I would set them straight.
happy new year,
Robert
"There won’t be anything we won’t say to people to try and convince them that Our way is the way to go. "
–Bill Gates