Woe betide my broken Motorola V220 (and all mobiles)

At one and a half years I figu­red my phone could last at least dou­ble that and I wouldn’t have to fork out for a snazzy new gizmo for quite a while. I’m not par­ti­cu­larly enthu­sias­tic towards mobile pho­nes, yes I am fas­ci­na­ted by their all-in-one capa­bi­li­ties and ongoing impro­ve­ments (as, after all, I am an elec­tro­nic engi­neer) and I would love to have a 7 mega pixel camera, built in digi­tal radio, 4gb hdd, javasc­ript ena­bled inter­net, blue­tooth and all those other perks but one sim­ple fact remains; I do not use my phone as a telephone enough to warrant a monthly paid con­tract agree­ment. Thus I am left with the low end pay as you go options and all the shitty fallouts, or the one off cost of £300 for something high spec.

Because everything is gea­red towards con­tracts and the tech­no­logy is moving along so fast it seems nothing is built to last, this rules out my second option — a £300 price tag is not a worthy invest­ment if it wont last me 2 years, that and I am lia­ble to lose it and phone insu­rance is a scam. My pre­vious two pho­nes both died a mise­ra­ble screen-fading Nokia death before their time and all the other in-betweens have had atro­cious bat­tery pro­blems; I have yet to lose a phone and I don’t drop them — they just are not built to last. And so onto my Moto­rola story; having aban­do­ned the faulty scree­ned Nokia pro­duct lines I ven­tu­red towards a new manu­fac­tu­rer, Moto­rola paying a lowly £40 for the V220 model. I vie­wed this purchase as an inter­me­diary until high spe­ci­fi­ca­tion models became affor­da­ble and I plan­ned for it to last 3 years. Come Satur­day after­noon, a windy but rela­ti­vely warm winter’s day in Lei­ces­ter, my fully char­ged un-dropped never bashed phone with already defunct camera is sit­ting quietly in my poc­ket. Oh, my phone is on vibrate-then-ring, set to loud -  I have a mis­sed call that I somehow mis­sed while wai­ting expec­tantly for the phone to go off (this hap­pens often). Unloc­king the clam I am pre­sen­ted with this:

Pretty colours. My first ins­tinct is to reset, remove bat­tery and SIM, replace and res­tart. The error con­ti­nues and this con­firms my fears: c’est cassé! All the func­tions of the phone still seem to work, I can ring peo­ple (if I know their num­ber) and change the ring volume, etc, I just can­not see what I am doing. My first guess as to the cause was faulty soft­ware — a nasty bug that I could fix if only I could get to that “reset to fac­tory set­tings” option somehow (why isn’t there a but­ton inside to do that?). Howe­ver I am now thin­king it may be due to wear and tear on the clam’s hinge which would explain why the camera went first. Ulti­ma­tely I plan to open this all up and take a look inside, my sis­ter has the same phone that she doesn’t use so I can raid it for spare parts, etc.

Con­si­de­ring I have just finished a safety cri­ti­cal sys­tems course where requi­red fai­lure rates are 1 in 100,000 years, this per­sis­tent fai­lure of pho­nes within 24 months when no mis­treat­ment has occu­rred irri­ta­tes and annoys me to no end. The irony is that I was for a short time over the sum­mer an “honou­ra­ble Moto­ro­lan”, i.e. an emplo­yee of theirs (somewhat). I guess now I shall move on to Sony Erics­son and then another manu­fac­tu­rer when that model una­voi­dably fails.