My Failed Adventures with Cell Phones

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

Intro

Apart from being an electronics engineer, I used to be a cellphone enthusiast back in the day. I used to switch cellphones as frequently as every three months, and I tried the best I could to use something exciting, not your boring, generic, mainstream phone built for the masses. However, these real-life experiments, or rather, adventures, did not always succeed.

Windows Mobile and Microsoft

I used Windows Mobile Pocket PCs such as i-mate K-Jam, i-mate JasJar, and HTC Touch Pro as my daily divers. Mind you, these were not Windows Phones, but the predecessors that weren’t iPhone killers, because they didn’t need to be. They were by the name Pocket PCs, and hence were way better for productivity and not so much for play, though they did that pretty well too.

Most, if not all of my cellphones used to be pre-owned, but I also made a mistake with a brand new HTC 7 Mozart, one of my biggest mistakes, trusting Microsoft with their blunders, with a lot of skepticism, and my hard earned money.

Entering the World of Android

With Windows Mobile no longer supported, and having finally found Android worthy enough to replace my Pocket PCs starting with Android 4 (codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich), I also used a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 as my daily driver for a short while, which turned a lot of heads, and that was an experience. I still have this device with me, though it has seen better days, especially in terms of software support and battery health.

Evaluating BlackBerry

I also used a BlackBerry Passport Silver Edition for a couple of years, turned a lot more heads, faced a lot of software support issues, and eventually switched over to modern Android with a OnePlus 5T.

Back to Android

Soon, I hopped onto the Razer Phone 2, the phone that wasn’t supposed to exist, one with extremely loud speakers and a configurable RGB backlight at the back, a Sony Xperia 5 iii, a pretty compact phone with flagship-grade hardware, and then a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5, a delightful flip phone with modern hardware and software support.

Issues with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5

Talking about the issues with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5, I’d start with saying that I loved the form factor, mostly because it folds in half, not opens up to twice the size as the Fold or other similar offerings from competing brands, making it one of the smallest modern Android phones from a major manufacturer. Even after having used quite a lot of different form factors, none of my earlier cellphones was a flip phone, and the overall experience using a flip phone was perfect. I did not care about the selfie using the main camera feature, but I used it as an integrated stand. This phone didn’t come without issues, however, and a few major ones are as follows:

• As Samsung couldn’t split the battery into two as they did with the screen, this device suffered from a lower battery capacity than your regular modern smartphone. Also, as it did not accept many of the charging cables I had with me, charging was almost only possible with wireless chargers. I did not invest in a higher-watt wireless charger, and that made the problem even worse.
• This thing overheated as if it was going to melt, especially when carried in a car that supported wireless Android Auto, even when I wasn’t using Android Auto.
• Samsung kept pushing bloatware in the form of apps that I did not explicitly install, and so did T-Mobile, though the latter often did that through prompts that I had to skip to prevent it from automatically installing the “essential” apps it thought I’d need in my toy phone.
• With every Android update, major or minor, Samsung kept pushing more and more AI features that I did not ask for in the first place.

Conclusion

All in all, it’s been a fun journey, but most of my phones were problematic one way or the other. And, after over two years filled with ups and downs with my Samsung Galaxy Flip phone, I’m ready to take on another adventure, my twenty-first cellphone, which I’ll soon talk about on this channel, so stay tuned!