A New Calling

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This one's both a bit of a rant and a bit technical.

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I have a new phone.

Which is to say: I have a slightly crappy camera with an MP3 player, radio and phone built in. The terms of the contract are such that it'll cost me half as much as the old phone which did half as much - unless I use more than 100 minutes a month, in which case it'll cost me twice as much. If you see what I mean.

I've got the good people of Samsung to thank for two, um, innovations.

The first is that the fitting for the external (microSD) memory card...well, isn't external. You've got to literally take the phone apart to put your "easily portable" plug-in memory in place. And again when you want to put put new files on it - which you do with a fiddly, easy-to-lose little USB device.

Bluetooth is barely adequate - if incredibly slow - as a workaround, but there should be no need for any workaround.

The second...unovation...is a propitiatory form of USB that combines audio-out for headphones, power-in for recharging the battery, and standard USB comms for getting photos off the camera onto the laptop, and MP3s off the laptop into the phone. Very neat - one port covers three functions.

Except for the small details that:
(1) There's absolutely no need to invent yet another variant of USB to do it, because the already existing forms can do it perfectly well. The whole point of a Universal Serial Bus was to have just one format for all uses - now there's at least five.

(2) I now have a single pair of (slightly rubbish) headphones that'll plug into the phone, and one rechanger. So much for interchangability.

Of course, it can make good business sense to make your products incompatible with those of your competitors. It may not get you new customers much, but for the ones who chose your products first, they're chained to you.

Either that's what's happening here, or people who design phones aren't very smart. You decide.

Speaking of smart, and decision, you may be asking why Kapitano wasn't smart enough to decide on a different phone. The answer is there were a dozen phones available for the tariff scheme I wanted - most of which looked fantastic, had lots of lavish extra features I'd never use but no way of communicating with a computer at all.

I'm reminded of the Piers Anthony short story about the toaster which could clean your home and diagnose your neuroses, but refused to make toast.

Oh, and one phone boasted the best new idea of them all - a miniature typewriter keyboard for writing things longer than SMSes...with the letters arranged in a pattern used, so far as I know, in no other device in the world.

I don't mind learning to type, but I won't relearn it for every typewriter.

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UPDATE: In two days, three people have told me they're never going to buy anything by Samsung ever again. The products are full of design flaws, batteries drain in a day, and firmware fixes are nonexistent.

It would be nice if they'd said all this two days previous, as I wouldn't now be stuck with a two year contract with a phone which looks great on paper, which is turning into a millstone.

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