I am wasting my time.
No. Behind that crescent facade is a lament worthy of a thousand songs. This warudo is crumbling down to the very core as Imanity's struggle to reign supreme continues.
Wisely or not, well, I'm not quite sure. I'm full of youth, therefore social protocol dictates that I should also be stupid. So, I guess, not wisely.
How many times have I said 'wastng' and its derivatives during my last post? Without backtracking I think I said it twice. But then I retracted my statement of 'wasting' to 'spending'. Convincing myself that time intended for a productive X duty was used on a leisurely Y duty instead makes me feel more comfortable in doing that Y duty.
Right now, as I come up with words that I won't be using for my exam Tomorrow night, what I'm doing is a Y duty. A pointless one to many, I'm sure.
Two blog posts ago I made an entry showing the funeral rites of my 4th mobile phone. It's not that morbid really, I just poked fun on it and now that I look back it's entirely wrong, and of bad moral taste. I'm sorry.
Anyway, my journey towards the path to a replacement mobile phone, or should I say smartphone, has led me to three realizations:
Post-Paid Lockdown
I was supposed to use my mom's old phone which she received after signing up for a post-paid plan a few years ago. The phone she's presently using is from a renewed post-paid plan of the same network provider she signed up for last year. I suppose it's okay to namedrop her network provider, I mean it's not like this blog has enough reputation to merit a multitude of followers and influence their thoughts. So, as I was saying, my mom's network provider is Smart.
As a rule, and I suppose it applies to all network providers here in this well governed country, whenever Client A applies for a post-paid plan for Network Provider B, Client A will receive a phone and a post-paid sim card. The mobile phone and sim Client A receives from Network Provider B are meant to complement each other. How so? It's a simple relationship, really. Both the sim card and mobile phone have that figurative stamp of ownership from the Network Provider they came from. The mobile phone is usually locked to only function whenever a sim card of that specific network provider is used. The sim card on the other hand may be used on any other mobile phone provided that that phone is not locked to a different network.
Disclaimer though: I'm not entirely sure. I'm just speaking from existence and I just can't be bothered to google search this trivial matter.
The mobile phone I was set to use, the one that my mom got from her initial post-paid plan with Smart, the one that Smart said was locked to only using Smart sim cards, the one Smart said was locked only for the duration of the contract, is still locked to this day. As I said I am young and stupid but I at least know how some of the mechanisms that move this world works. But when it comes to telephones, cellphones, mobile phones, smartphones, communication devices - anything at all that is related to communication, I know very little about.
But what about it being locked? What about it that bothered me so much? It's because, since third year high school, I've been using the same contact number and network provider: Sun.
I was bewildered after I gently inserted the sim card to the sim slot and powered the enchanted communication device on. It rejected me. It repelled me. Like it doesn't want me to communicate at all, ever, or to wake up at a set time, ever. A mobile phone managed to send chills down my spine. They were just small, insignificant chills, but just significant enough for me to be affected. An electronic device was capable of such thing? Or did I just, in my subconscious state of mind, allowed myself to submit to the will of technology?
I'm exaggerating.
Still, to this day I'm still bewildered about how that mobile phone from my mom's initial post-paid plan some four years ago was still locked two years after it was practically discarded and passed off as just another form of an expensive alarm clock.
Perhaps unlocking it is not done automatically...that's a bummer.
The Generic Market
*actual scenario I had last Sunday (translated in English for your universal reading convenience)*
Me: Do you sell flip phones here?
Staff: Flip covers, sir? Yes we have plenty, but for what model?
Me: No, flip phones. Clam shell design.
Staff: Yes, we have plenty of flip wallets here. But I need the model of the phone to get the right size.
Me: No. Flip Phone (I clasped my hands). I'm asking for a flip phone-type of mobile phone.
Staff: Oh, I'm sorry sir. We only sell smartphones here.
Either I've seriously been watching too much anime to weeb around so much or the Philippine Telecommunications Market is just too simple, but c'mon. No flip phones?! It's like the best thing that's ever happened to mobile phones. And I'm not just talking about the Motorola flip phone from years ago, I'm talking about SoftBank-style flip phones. They're non-existent here. But y'know what kind of mobile phones are sold at every corner of the market here? Touchscreen mobile phones, smartphones as you will. It's infuriating.
Flip phones: zero?!
It's not even zero, at least with zero it has a chance of being incremented. It's null. Flip phones: NULL!
Last Sunday, as a final solution to solve the un-restful state of my not having any mobile phone, mom and I took a short trip to SM Calamba to look for my fifth mobile phone.
As I said, I'm the epitome of Patrick Starfish when it comes to mobile phones so I'm not very picky...actually, looking back, it's the opposite.
I was very picky.
We spent the majority of our time at SM Calamba's CyberZone where everywhere you look there are always smartphones neatly lined up waiting to be adopted by a new owner.
We went to more than ten stores, backtracking to some of them as we made rounds, searching first and foremost for a flip phone. But I am appalled to realize that no one, absolutely no one had the slightest idea what I was talking about. The market is controlled by touchscreen demon phones! Every store we visit the premier product is always the black, soulless rectangular piece of circuit boards topped with an LCD screen. It's scary, and they all friggin' look the same. Where's the variety?
How do you expect a picky eater to choose from a set of identical meals when he can't differentiate and predict the taste by just an initial look?
GAAAAAGH
ZETSUBOUSHITA!
This overly touchscreen utilitarian society has given me despair. Leave me alone to rot in a ditch somewhere.
It's like manufacturers sacrificed creativity for practicality and efficiency. The result? A disjointed family of increasingly large rectangular bars of boredom personified. And what's worse is that people actually like those stuff. People. Real life humans.
Do they feel pleasure taking out a long plank of technology out of their back pocket whenever their butt vibrates?!
It's, agh, dear lord. If this continues, and I'm sure it will, the day flip phones, maybe even SoftBank treading on Philippine territory will never come. So much for my plan to act cool as I take out sky blue SoftBank mobile phone from my back pocket when it vibrates and flip the phone as if someone from a colorless gang in Ikebukuro was contacting me.
Sigh.
Fantasy is truly better than this rotten reality.
Moving on...
This phone is good for Selfies. BUY IT!
After suffering from the wrath of the touch-me-plenty screens that plague the telecommunications market of this beloved Pearl of the Orient Sea, mom and I made our final stop, for the second time, at Samsung.
I braced myself for all the sales talk that a painfully awkward and introverted person like me is not used to having. Two salespersons entertained my mom and I, and did their best to sell their products.
The first two phones available for potential customers to tinker was the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S5. It was a shiny piece of device and I almost got suck into the abyss of its beautiful LCD screen but just beside me was the price. A whopping 34,000 PhP mobile phone. Dear god, why do things like this exist? All the home consoles of this console generation are much cheaper than this metallic rectangular device. Who, in the right state of mind, would buy a phone that expensive? Sure you can argue about the features but c'mon! Invest in a laptop instead. There are plenty of mid-range laptops and maybe even high-end laptops available for the same price, and just make do with a cell phone with only the bare necessities. With 34,000 PhP my dorm fee for the whole semester is paid and I get to buy two new games for the Nintendo 3DS with the excess. What's the point of it all if it's too expensive for what it's used for.
Sigh. Whatever. Later on this post I'll slightly be thought of as a hypocrite.
The staff who entertained us pretty much knew what makes their products special. It didn't matter, though. As I said I'm painfully awkward and talking to kind, well-trained in sales pitching people like them makes me uneasy. What they said were all blocked off by my inability to relax in situations that happen in public. I am a weak, and pathetic person with no future romantic relationships destined in the future, I am sure of it.
Anyway, as the two ladies spoke to my mom I wandered off to the far end of the store to look at the mock-ups displayed. To my surprise they actually had a flip phone, the Samsung E1272, but it's not an old-school styled phone. To be more precise, it's a phone from the school of old. I hope I'm making sense. It's like a brethren of the Nintendo Gamecube, from years back when they were at their full glory. It's not the type of flip phone that I was looking for, though.
What surprised me more, though was the specs listed for every smartphones in that row of mock-ups.
SELFIES.
They were using the capability of the phones to take selfies. Since When? When did selfies become part of mobile specs?
Is the general public so fixated in taking photos of themselves posing like bewildered monkeys in public using their mobile phone that selfies are as important as processing power?!
How? Why? When? Why, again? Why, yet again?! It doesn't make any sense. The story of Link: The Faces of Evil from the Zelda CDi games makes more sense than friggin' selfies.
What kind of circle in technological hell did the world fall into? Or, no. Did we voluntarily dive in it and just let insanity consume us.
I just, I can't accept such a shallow factor in selling well-built devices like those. And I can't forgive the people who inspired this to happen. Like what, you just go to a Samsung outlet and scan the smartphones, see its selfie prowess and say "Oh golly! These phones sure are high tech. 15, 000? Ten of them please! #Samsung #smartphones #selfie #Vanity #blessed #iwillhauntyouinyoursleepifthisdoesntstopbythetimeidepartfromthislandoftheliving
To conclude my rage and the time I could've spent reviewing:
My mom insisted on buying me a Samsung Galaxy J7. Take note, she insisted, That's the truth. I initially pointed my judgmental index finger towards the figure of the less superior J5 as it is cheaper and its price to performance value is already a good deal, my mom being the motherly mother that she is, wanted the very best for her 19 year old forever single weeb of a son and got me the J7.
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| the wallpaper doesn't belong to me. Credits go to the Pixiv artist, which I don't have any link to, sorry |
See, in the end I got one of the smartphones I so degraded in the middle part of this post. It's hypocrisy at its best. And I accept.
What I don't accept is the possibility of this model entering the Philippine market just a few days after I accepted a mobile phone that's obviously too good for me:
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| Samsung G9198, initially for China, but now I'm hoping it won't come to the Philippines, It won't appeal here. To me it will, but for the rest? I don't think so! Not after all that. NO! |
So let me get this straight. After all that searching for a flip phone, and after finally settling with a touchscreen smartphone, then comes a FLIPPYTY FLAPPITY FLIP PHONE!
NO!
NOOOOOO!
Goodnight.
Also I feel that this is obligatory:
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| forgive me for the nightmares to come in your slumber at the heart of this restless evening. Source for the Moon. |
I'm not making any sense anymore.
Goodnight, sweet dreams. Just listen to Yiruma or something, you guys deserve better than all these.
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