The View | Terrified of ever being unconnected? Find yourself staring at a tiny screen, ignoring your dining companions? Then read this...
You’re showing the early signs of becoming a ‘smartphoneista’ – but help is at hand, in the shape of the (non-exploding) HK$200 Samsung Anycall
Schadenfreude is not a commendable emotion but it sure is irresistible. Never more so when this proud owner of a Samsung Anycall mobile telephone surveys the mayhem out there in the hi-tech world of smartphones and other hand-held devices.
The honest citizens who literally forked out something like 30 or maybe 40 times more than the cost of an ever-reliable Anycall for a Samsung Note 7 smartphone will probably have already returned these potentially lethal devices to their dealers.
I could, at this point, be magnanimous enough not to furnish examples of a whole string of other hi-tech duds, but, frankly, why resist the temptation? So let’s be reminded of past mobile device blunders, such as the “wonderful” Blackberry Play Book device that was supposed to be just great for high-definition videos but proved to be useless for all the other things that smartphones are supposed to do. Unlike the Play Book, Amazon’s 2014 Fire Phone did not manage to kill off the company but it was a spectacular dud, somewhere on a par with Google’s Nexus Q, launched two years earlier that was supposed to ‘make media consumption more social’.
Frankly, I don’t even know what that means.
The list of duds is much longer but I reckon that readers will have got the point, unlike myself who is frequently and patronisingly told that I just don’t get the point of all these hi-tech devices, moreover I am, apparently missing out on all sorts of just wonderful smartphone benefits.
I remain dubious and would like to place on the record the many, many advantages of keeping mobile telephony simple.