Every time my phone vibrates, I get anxious for a number of reasons. The first is obvious: unwanted communication (landlord, ex, name it). The second, however, is a unique case. I have a very trusty old delicate Nokia phone that always lives on the edge. I await its passing every day and that its own vibration could send it convulsing or dead doesn’t appall me anymore.
But I love it. I had a good phone. One that could take selfies and IG them (that’s Instagram, I think), spew both music and video, take great pictures and act like a woman: multitask. It had more than one brain and could chew through all the rubble that is social media and heavy internet browsing without qualm. Samantha was great. (Yes, I’ve named them all). But she’s… it’s gone. Kenya happened to it, y’know.
Well, thankfully, this… this Nokia thing (I don’t even remember the model number. I could check it of course, but that would involve killing it) can still do things. Things like let me peek into Facebook and Twitter amidst its fits and faints. That is to be appreciated, right? It tweets too! Via text. But tweeting is tweeting, right? The end justifies the means. And a dark hole behind the flap (it’s a flap phone) says it should take pictures too. But that’s stretching it. I tried and all I could see was either light or darkness in form of moving shadows, depending on where I pointed the ‘camera’.
On its good days though, it works well. It’s still indecisive about its battery life. At best, a couple of days. At worst, well, it doesn’t wake at all. It still needs a couple of belts before it responds to pounding on the power button, the belts being two tight rings of cello tape around its lower half. It drops calls on its own, occasionally. I guess it’s jealous of who I’m speaking to, or the fact that I use it to ask mzee for another phone. It’s not all gloomy and hell with it though. In its heydays, it was a charm. Around 2009 or so, it was a treasure. It could browse the net, (never mind it was GPRS), play a maximum of two songs, take grainy photos and it had Bluetooth. Bluetooth! Back then, that was the epitome of tech. It still has, though it is trippy nowadays. I spent the whole of last week with Megan.
Megan is Robin’s tablet. A Microsoft Surface 3 beauty. A sweet sweet thing. And having spent the whole of last semester servicing his ancient moody laptop, an old Dell Vostro, I could see why he chose to name his next device like a ‘bangworthy’ mistress. He’s in love. But despite his thrill over his new toy (toy being Megan, pervy folks), he still reminisces his old Vostro. His trusty old machine.
It saw him through many assignments and movie nights and redacted adult sessions. (Ok. That last one’s made up). All this makes me wonder whether the emergence of new gadgets everyday makes us forget to appreciate the value of our old birds. The Samsung Note 7 is a coveted toy now, but a trusty old Nokia X2 is still a gem. The likes of Nokia 3310 have been known to be hardy devices that aren’t gentle on floors whose battery lives last weeks. How many times has your Mulika Mwizi survived your pub fights, called you a cab or lit your way home in your drunken stupor dead in the night?
The ability to tweet faster than I can say tweet has nothing on that. Don’t get me wrong though. I miss my old phone too because it had Pocket, which let me read blogs and whatnot even when I went offline. But that’s close to the only thing I miss about it. Truth is, I am a geek. I will drool over the next deca-core phone and ogle at their diet figures.
I will gape at their tons of new features that should seemingly make life easier. But in truth, all these are fancies. It has been so much easier with this Nokia (when it is alive, that is) than with the brushed aluminum descendants from the likes of HTC and Apple. No pestering notifications about Facebook pokes and retweets. And it is so much easier to pocket a flap phone. Nothing like shoving a Galaxy Note behemoth in your skinny jeans. Perhaps I’m just bitter that I do not have my dream HTC One A9, or a knocker like the Oneplus X. Perhaps I have a point.
