I reluctantly changed platforms from Blackberry to Android recently because every time I looked up something on the web, the phone would hang.
On the screen you would see the most irritating thing in virtual Earth — a circle of grey bars that went round and round and then turn to white as they cheekily went past.
I went on c/net for help and the phone guru advised me to tweak the browser setting before suggesting that I deselect JavaScript and change my image quality to low.
“Try pulling out the battery, wait a few moments and power up. It works,” she said finally.
After a couple of futile hours spent removing the battery and putting it back, I asked a bewildered salesperson at a gadget showroom: “Is there something you can do to speed up the phone. You know, like maybe give me a new battery, or should I delete the photos in my gallery, or can you clean up the memory”? I asked desperately.
He looked at my cell phone and then looked up at me sadly maybe because I seemed to be so out of touch with the world of mobile communications.
“Why don’t you try this,” he quickly said, showing me a brand, new shiny phone that did not look any different from what was in my palm. “It comes with 2 GB [gigabytes] and you can add another 16 with a SD card,” he said.
I hate my phone but I also love it very much, though it has now become ancient. The other day when it fell unnoticed under my car seat, I panicked and with my heart pounding, turned the whole apartment upside down searching for it, as if losing the plastic phone with a Qwerty keyboard was a great tragedy.
After finding it, the sense of relief was immense and later I read somewhere that there is a new fear in society today, and it is called Nomophobia — the fear of being out of touch. This phobia, I believe, affects women more than men.
One day as I watched the grey bars go round and round, a friend gifted me with a spanking new Samsung phone, and my life changed, again.
Sending a message from my Blackberry was simple; I typed it with my thumbs like a chimpanzee trying to free a nut from a bottle with a small-mouth, and off it went into the ethereal world. My new phone is much smarter; it tries to read my mind and has got me into trouble.
I did not know this earlier but after I sent out many ‘Happy Eid’ messages, I realised that its in-built Korean-English dictionary was sending out real gibberish to my friends and contacts. When I punched in the letters on the tiny, virtual keyboard, I hadn’t seen the many choices it was offering me. For “Happy” the choices were: “Gappy”, “Happier” “Happens” and “Happily”.
I realised that when you punch in the return button without choosing any one of its offerings, the phone quickly makes its own choice.
After living in Dubai for many years I realised that most people don’t really respond to wishes and greetings. Generally, there is deathly silence and there is no, “Hey, have a good one too,” or “The same to you” or whatever the polite reply should be.
By chance I looked in the ‘Sent” mailbox and saw the crazy messages my phone had been sending and wondered how anyone could not respond to a ridiculous message such as, “Gappy Rid”.
Then I sent a message to my contact saying, “Thursdays fine”, and it went out as “Thursday Sacrifice”.
This technology, I believe, is very advanced and is known as ‘predictive text’.
I found out that the mistakes this software makes by trying to be too smart is known as Auto-Correct Fail.
