The End of the Story First (which is how blogs work)

SO, I was looking at the remnants, stubs and cinders that make up my sad collection of blogs, and for some reason I felt motivated to finish the story of how I Hate My New Cellphone.  I had stopped documenting the cellphone purchase when I was halfway through the process, and the ending was actually kind of amusing.  So here goes the End of The Story:

You will recall (only you won't recall, because this is a blog, so you read the last part first, which is stupid in itself, but this is about cellphone stupidity...) You will recall that I had defined what I wanted in a cellphone (a phone, with good battery life, that could take good pictures and upload them to Facebook or something without being connected to a PC, for a couple hundred bucks, the end).  I had looked at the marketplace circa beginning of 2012 and found that this seemingly reasonable wish list was not fulfillable.  The market was moving to smart phones, which at that point in time were expensive, clunky battery hogs.  No simple networked camera soup for you!

Being obstinate, I refused to accept that and I found a phone on the Internet that seemed to do what I wanted.  It was a Motorola ZN5, a candybar style phone with a Kodak branded camera.

It was an older phone, out for a couple of years and end of life and available for pretty cheap ($150 or something).  The camera seemed good, it had a decent flash, good battery life, and WiFi.  Pretty much what I wanted, so I went ahead and ordered it.  Yaay!

And you know, it has been a pretty good camera and a pretty good phone.  I took it to India where it was my main camera (my wife Michele took pictures with our conventional digital camera).  I took over a thousand photos.  I could enable the camera with one hand, by feel, by clicking the unlock button and sliding the lens cover.  Within two seconds I could lift the camera and take a picture.  I made a point of not even looking at the LCD screen, I just pointed and clicked at absolutely everything in front of me.  I got tons of excellent pictures that way and picturetaking was never obtrusive.

BUT - Always a big but -

My phone itself apparently came from India.  I bought it in Canada, but over the Internet, and it seems to be an Indian phone.  So, for example, my contacts list includes about half a dozen Motorola technical support numbers for places like Mumbai, New Delhi and so on, and I can't erase them.  Everyone before "M" in the alphabet, they are fine, but everyone after that, I have to scroll through a list of completely useless Hindi Motorola numbers before I can get to them.

Being from India, this phone has some unusual wallpapers preinstalled:


The phone's Indian identity was not really a problem, and I actually kind of liked it as a reminder of my India trip.  However, the websharing of photos did not work out at all.  Turns out the phone can really only upload photos to a Kodak Easyshare website.  OK, I thought, I will build a whole image repository on this Easyshare thingee and it can be an online home for my pictures.  So I went to easyshare.kodak.com or whatever and set up my account with hierarchical file folders and whatnot.  Then I loaded up some pictures from the phone.  Then I went back to find them.  Nothing!  What the hell?

Turns out that the phone uploaded them to some European version of easyshare, easyshare.kodak.cc.eu or some damn thing like that.  And I could not change it for love or money.  I guess I could have gone with the flow and built my image repository in the Czech republic or wherever it was.  But somehow I lost enthusiasm at that point.

Now I have a corporate iPhone that does everything I want perfectly.  Too bad its not mine.