Dumbphone

This is going to be a long week. As you might have been able to tell from my blog posts and Twitter feed, I’ve gotten just about fed up with Windows Mobile, especially when I see a lot of iPhone users running around, and my own experience on the iPod Touch does not match that of Windows Mobile at all.

My Samsung Epix was growing more and more frustrating each day. I was spending way too much time rebooting it and complaining about it. I’d launch an application, use it for a minute, then be told that I didn’t have a connection to the Internet. Pocket Internet Exploder had long since stopped storing my cookies.

I came to the conclusion that it must be time for a hard reset. I’ve had this Epix since November. My first one had all kinds of problems, the biggest of which is that the screen kept turning on for no reason, which drained the battery life. It also inadvertently closed or launched programs when it turned on in my pocket. I had to get a warranty replacement.

When I got home from church this morning, I decided to hard reset my Epix. I’ve been moving more and more into “the cloud”, so I had very little to back up, and I keep anything important on the storage card anyway. I did the hard reset.

That’s when the problems started.

If you’ve ever had to setup a Windows Mobile device from scratch, the very first screen you come to tells you to tap the screen to set up your device. Next is the screen alignment part. I could not get past screen alignment. I would align the screen and the process would start all over again. I called AT&T. The Customer Service rep agreed that I should get a warranty replacement. I had to wait until noon to call warranty.

The case worked out that I’ll be FedEx’ed a warranty replacement Epix. It’ll be reconditioned rather than a new one. Now I have to wait for it to show up.

Until then, I’m back to my “dumbphone”. I have a SonyEricsson z525. I don’t call it a dumbphone because it’s dumb. It’s actually a very good phone, but it’s not a “Smartphone”, so I call it a “dumbphone”. It still works. I charged the battery up and I’ve been running most of the day with it. It’s a good phone, but I’m going to miss the capabilities, however unstable and unreliable, of my Epix. I have my work issued BlackBerry which can pick up some of the slack, but it’s a 7130e, a 2006 model, and is darn near obsolete. The browser won’t even load Google Reader anymore. I had to download Opera Mini to keep me going in long meetings.

At least I’ve come a long way since the time my hx4705 died. I was lost for weeks. It’s like I didn’t know where my head was. I used that thing heavily and had no backup.