#nokia bricks

[infophoneblog]

Sony Ericssons, Motorola razors, Nokia Bricks, and Blackberry found in my parents forgotten boneyard.

Sony Ericssons, Motorola razors, Nokia Bricks, and Blackberry found in my parents forgotten boneyard.

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[duckyreads]

Reinventing the reinvention of the wheels

Sometimes, I feel like people aren't paying any attention to what is already available when they make a kickstarter. It's not innovative if people already made it 15 years ago. It's especially not innovative if they made it 15 years ago and have already reinvented it since then. I'm glad that people can be excited about a phone that does nothing but call people. The thing is? We still have those phones. I'm not just talking payphones and land-lines. I'm saying I still own my perfectly functional Nokia brick. Yes, it's a brick, but it calls people and it holds a charge basically forever. When people assume based on my demographic - [a.k.a., (recently graduated) art student in the Bay Area at the heart of Silicon Valley] - that I own a smart phone, I am always happy to correct them via demonstration. I pull the giant phone out of my pocket and show it to them. "It's black and white, I think you might be able to play snake on it, and I use it to call people." It turns out these old phones are apparently cult classics now. I get that. They work, and they don't break the way others do. ( I mean, it's still working, and I got it at the turn of the millennium.) Someone felt the need to reinvent them, though. I saw an ad for what looked an awful lot like a clone of my phone, except marketed towards senior citizens. It was called "the jitterbug". Its main selling point was that the only thing it did was call people. It had large buttons and a black and white screen, and basically looked like the younger brother to my Nokia brick. Now, someone is apparently re-inventing this reinvention. They're marketing it as "the light phone", and "the anti-smart phone". Its specialty is calling people, and nothing else. It has large and obvious buttons. Its charge is supposed to last 20 days, which sounds pretty pathetic given how much battery life is supposed to have advanced in the last 20 years. "Only $100!" Spare me. For that, I could buy several of its predecessors. I'm happy that people are still interested in phones that only call people, but I'm not going to pay $100 for something I got as a hand-me-down from my sister in the beginning of high school. Seriously. It may be last-century, but it's not like eBay has it at 'antique' prices. Spare me these non-innovative innovations.