An Old Friend's Retirement.

Retired - The good ol' Samsung.

I’ve never really been the most punctual person, but I do get there in the end. It’s better late than never… I’m finally here in the 21st Century!

I decided last month that I would buy a new phone as my poor old Samsung was getting a little tired. The cheeky little blighter turned 4 years old last month and I decided it had worked long enough. Upon this decision I thought it was the right time to get a new phone and retire my Samsung, I did consider the same option as the government - increasing the age of retirement - pushing it to five years, but I thought this was just unfair on my poor phone who’d worked bloody hard these past four years.

The strain of serving me for four years was getting to it now, the buttons were worn out and tired. Numbers 2 and 4 were all but dead, making texting with the vowels A and I incredibly difficult, and the other numbers were going the same way too. It was the dignified thing to do to put it out to pasture. I didn’t want its story to end broken down and unusable. It deserved better than that.

Unfortunately this meant I would have to find a new phone, and I hate phone shopping. Going into a store gets you those annoying sales staff with clipboards asking you how many minutes you spend calling a landline and forcing pointless bolt-ons down your throat - so I really didn’t want to do that.

So I headed online to see what I could find there. After about 5 minutes I was totally drunk - so many makes, so many models. I had no idea what I was looking for, each one had different spiel to throw at my bedazzled face in an attempt to entice me into buying that particular model. So I gave up on that idea too.

Begrudgingly I ended up in an O2 store browsing the phones on offer. I’m on O2 so naturally I went with them in looking for a new handset. I’m not going to Carphone Warehouse, they’ll beat me down with a bloody clipboard!

Anyway, there I was in O2 and inevitably I’m approached by the staff who didn’t listen to anything I said as usual. I wanted to stay with Pay and Go but they were insistent that I moved to contract as it would save me many monies. Thing is I knew it wouldn’t save me money as I’d already worked out how much it’d cost me on both options and Pay and Go won by quite a way. Okay, I’d have to spend a lot upfront buying the handset but I’d save in the long run not shelling out money to O2 via a direct debit. I gave up with them and left.

So what did I learn from that experience? Nothing I didn’t already know: phone stores suck, I want Pay & Go and I don’t want a touch screen phone. The latter of those three was going to prove difficult to me as pretty much every phone on the market has a sodding touch screen!

I wanted to get a smartphone as they have really good features as well as wi-fi and all that so my choice in the end was an easy one: Blackberry. I’m not a fan of iPhones and the HTC models although they look cool, have a touch screen and are more expensive than a weekend in London! So that left me with the Blackberry; it has buttons, a qwerty keyboard, it’s got wi-fi and apps, and it can actually make phone calls! There’s nothing quite like calling a friend with an iPhone only for it to randomly disconnect, two way iPhone conversations must be a nightmare!

So in the end I purchased the Blackberry Curve 9300 as I thought it was the best value for money. It took O2 a while to deliver it to me and when they finally did I had to wait 4 days for them to change over the tariff, but when they did and I finally got using it, I was so pleased to have caught up to the modern world.

Now I have my Blackberry, there’s no need to turn on my laptop to access the likes of Facebook and I can look at the news on it and all sorts! Not that Facebook for Blackberry is any good; every time I use it I get reminded of the time I tried to eat soup with a fork. I’m even able to tweet on the go now! It’s brilliant, I can actually use Twitter properly now! Well I say properly, this morning I embarrassingly tweeted when I was supposed to DM! Andy needs Twitter Tuition!

But in saying all of this I still kind of miss my old phone. Sure it looks like a Quarian’s head, the word Samsung has all but been entirely scratched off by me constantly opening and closing it, and yes its buttons may be more knackered than I am after a half marathon but it was just a cool little phone that rarely left my side for four years.

Such great memories: the photo I took of Toby on the first day I got it and then keeping it as my background photo for the whole four years, the time I was in Dubai airport and it stole all my credit for no reason, the week I attempted to use predictive text and annoyed everyone I knew as they couldn’t understand I word I said, and of course there’s the time I realised it had the internet on it after about three years of ownership.

Compared to the new era of phones it’s ancient, but I still love it. I’d have it over an iPhone any day. It’s such a plucky little phone that’s outlasted most other phones. I’ve never had a phone that’s lasted two years never mind four!

So thankyou little Samsung, enjoy your retirement, you’ve earned it.