Phone memories

I bought a new phone last April 8—a Sony Ericsson K800i, otherwise known as Cybershot phone. I got it in Greenhills, along with a 512 MB memory card and screen cover, for a cash out of 11k, plus a trade-in of my previous phone (Sony Ericsson W800i, the first Walkman phone, for 6k) and two phones James had lying around at home (a Nokia 1100 for 1k, and a damaged Nokia 3315 for P200… better than nothing hahaha!).

I had been deciding between a Nokia 6233 and Nokia N70, but found out that the Nokia 6233 could store only 500 names (which was my issue with my Walkman phone) and that neither had great reviews. Good thing the billboard across EDSA from my condo flashed in my head—the one that heralded that the Sony Ericsson Cybershot phone had won some or other award-giving body’s “best GSM phone of 2006”—and, checking the reviews, found out what a great phone it was.

I’ve been happy so far. The body and display look great, the features are no-nonsense, and the interface is a huge improvement over my last Sony Ericsson.

Thinking about this made me think back several years to my first phone—bought after graduation in 1999, primarily to keep in touch with James who was heading back to Cebu.

James and I had had a big fight when college was drawing to a close. I was idealistic back then, with Philosophy and Theology on my mind, and a virgin to the seductions of consumerism and compulsive acquisition. He urged me to buy a phone—no, he urged me to let him buy me a phone—so we could keep in touch. Silly me insisted on a “simple lifestyle”—that we should save the money and get by with weekly snail mail. Hah! Anyway, I gave in just to make him happy—but I wanted to be the one to buy the phone. Not something I’d be happy with, but if it would help keep the peace, then what the hell.

He took me to Greenhills and having learned from my cheapskate Tatay, we scoured the entire tiangge (which was not the orderly tiangge we know today) looking for the best deal. I bought myself a yellow Nokia 5110 for around P6k. We took it home, and James did all the setting up, with me pretending to be uninterested. I didn’t have a SIM yet (Me to James: “What’s a SIM?”) then because Globe Prepaid SIMs (Me to James: “Prepaid? What’s Prepaid?”) were always out of stock. (Cut to five years later when I was giving away Globe Gizmo SIMs because no one wanted them, mwahaha.) James had asked his Dad to buy one in Cebu (they were P300+ at the time), anyway James and I were flying to Cebu the next day for vacation.

I’ll admit, I quickly learned to love that phone. To this day, I feel sentimental when I see a Nokia 5110. It was functional, it was sturdy, and it came in cool colors (with lots of fake ones in Greenhills).

It's a classic. You just had to love that Navi-Key.

I didn’t love Globe though—no messages were getting through (this was right before they implemented a P1/text tariff), and besides, they cheated me out of P200 with a defective prepaid load card—but the phone. So how ironic it was—with my hate for phones in college, and the crap Globe put me through—when I joined Globe! Hahaha!

But I think I’ll need a whole different blog entry—maybe even 10 of them—just to ask whether Globe is crappier as a service provider, or an employer. So back to phones.

Between then and now, I went through 4 more phones:

1. Nokia 6210 (2001-2003). I got it because WAP was new—and because I was feeling the first consumerist urges to keep up with the Joneses, and phones were getting smaller and Bermuda Yellow was no longer cool. This must have been my favorite phone ever. Totally functional, totally fast, no-nonsense and professional, easy to use, totally sturdy… imagine it working after I slipped and fell on my butt on a sidewalk (thanks to Decolgen Forte just minutes earlier), and it flew out of my hand and bounced twice—once off a metal telephone cabinet and once on the concrete pavement.


2. Nokia 6610 (2003-2004). Again, keeping up with the Joneses… everyone had MMS! And I wanted a colored screen for colored photos and wallpapers. I liked this phone too… great white body and no major glitches… but it wasn’t as sturdy as the 6210. It scratched easily, and it just didn’t feel as strong.



3. Nokia 6660 (2004-2006). I got this because I’m a sucker for employee handset promos. This must be my second-to-the-worst phone. Slow, hanging software and lots of useless stuff loaded into it (these two things, in my mind, have pretty much become Nokia’s equity); and something went wrong with my speaker so I could never hear who I was talking to unless I was alone and everything was quiet).



4. Sony Ericsson W800i (2006-2007). Silly, silly, silly me—thinking that there was merit in building my equity as a musician by getting a walkman phone. Nonsense! The PC software used for loading MP3’s into the phone was even less reliable than iTunes, and I gave up updating my playlists after several headaches. And to that a totally counter-intuitive interface and a tiny phone book memory that had me staying up till 4 AM trying to figure out which 300 names I could afford to delete from my phone book. I was more than happy to give this one up.



5. Sony Ericsson K800i (2007 to the present). I talked about this earlier. Ahlaveht! And thank God for online reviews. I think I’ll have this phone for a pretty long time.

Now, watch out for my blog entry on ranting about Globe. Bwahahaha!