I hate mobile phones

There, I've said it.

It's bizarre really, given my background in technology, but I do, I hate mobile phones.  (This post is going to get quite "get off my lawn!", so be warned.)

(And mobile phone companies, I hate them too, that cheap £15 one I thought I'd ordered is going to be "delayed", I knew I should have just picked one up at the supermarket; but the company did promise "next day delivery".  I'm going to have to do a complex Skype redirection thing instead to get a disposable number.)

I've carried one around for years, but I've come to depend on it less, despite the convenience.  Even the old "where are you? I'm over at this end, oh your on the next street, hang about" type calls, I find it much easier to agree to meet in a certain location, then travel to that location, it works!  This factor was also encouraged by the lack of reception in Job No. 7, it could never get a signal and would run out of battery at lunchtime anyway (because of the signal searching); so practically every work day I would be phone-less.

I used to like my mobile phone, back in the day, so long ago that you weren't even sure another mobile user could recieve text messages.  In the days when there were Geocities websites with all the GSM codes for random things like "alerts when connecting to new cell".  Two line dot-matrix is all anyone needs, damnit!

I thought WAP was a good idea, until I actually used it and noticed it was shit.  And it was around this time that all the hype about "multimedia messaging" started, and 3G, and all these other complete wastes of time!  Despite all this, I'm not a complete refusenik, I'm not one of these nutters still using a 1998 vintage brick; I've had three 3G phones for instance.  But I've only ever made two video calls.

It's the "so near, but so far" factor that really annoys me.  Modern mobile phones aren't just phones, they've long since past that point.  But they're not particularly good at wholesale communications centres either, there's too many limits.  Things like the National Rail Live Departure Board on your phone is very useful, but then when your phone company starts to block it unless you pay an extra £2/month, then it's not a communication device anymore, it's some evil contraption worthy of Satan himself.

And then you have all these idiots, who proclaim that phones are going to take over cameras, TVs, and computers.  Firstly: no, no they're not; camera phones are a novelty at best, I don't care how many megapixels they have it's just not possible to take a good picture with a lens so small!  And why the hell would anyone want to use a phone as their main music collection; when the next upgrade comes around, whoops not transferable, better start again.  It will be a black day if any of those things ever happen.

And then, of course, you have the legendary breakability of new phones.  If you can get one to last twelve months you're doing well.  It's not just physical breakages either, things just stop working, a network will make an upgrade which is incompatible and all of a sudden that email client stops working... and the only upgrade is a firmware patch which needs a Windows XP (pre SP3) machine; talk about more trouble than it's worth.

There's too much rot, it's almost to be expected.  For example, a couple of weeks ago I was stuck, bored in the middle of nowhere; I decided to use my phone's web browser to look at the news.  Random error messages were all I got.

Standard, I thought, they must have changed some setting... it'll take me ages to track it down again.  But then I noticed the little icon at the top of the screen, the one that usually says "3G" was now showing a picture of a spiral bound notebook with the letter 'H' in the middle of it.  What the hell was that?

It turned out, after digging out the instruction manual, that it was on the recieving end of a HSDPA signal.  (And, as luck would have it, completely unrelated to the browser failure, that started working again a couple of days later!)  But what's the point of such things when it costs a fortune per megabyte for browsing.  These devices are all well and good, but they have no real practical purpose.

[ Nope, spoke too soon, the web browser has broken again; it can't even load the network providers homepage.  Useless, completely useless. ]

Which then brings me back to the phone companies themselves, and especially their deliberate obsfucation on price plans.  I can never even remember what price plan I'm on - I could until a couple of years ago, but not anymore.  There's so many freebies, but with so many gotchas, I don't know what's what.  I think I'm on more-or-less the right plan, because I sat down and went through my old bills, and then chose the best plan assuming the same pattern; but I'm not convinced of that because my usage patterns have changed, and I don't remember what the deal is!

So, I think to myself, I know, I'll look at my account online and see what I'm signed up to.  Fair enough, it tells me I have x many free minutes and y many free texts; except then on the next page, it says I have unlimited texts.  Which is it? 

I carry on and have a look at the full table of price plans, and according to that my plan should have 400 minutes.  Except then, you look into the details, and that says something else again!

What are these clowns playing at?  Except, for once, it's not incompetence, it's deliberate, it's all designed so you buy a price plan too big for the one you need.  You'll end up using only 1/1oth of the minutes, but sending too many texts (at an extortionate charge) for vice-versa; all while maintining an illusion of value.

But they're still only 12.5% as evil as recruitment consultants.

I have a couple of months left on this contract, and looking at the pay-as-you-go phones yesterday, some of those deals are quite good; much better than they used to be.  Perhaps that's the way forward, it means I won't be chained to any particular evil organisation for 18-months or more...