Hadda get a new cell phone

[thatcrazycajun]

Lost my second TracFone cellular last week, so I had to get a new one. Luckily, though I hate having to patronize such a politically-incorrect retailer, the Wal-Mart near where I work had TracFone's newest base-level offering, the Motorola C139. (And for just $19.97, even less than the already-dirt-cheap MSRP -- and less than half what I paid for the old one.) PricewaterhouseCoopers' TelecomDirect News reviews the unit here:

 "It may be hard to believe in this era of handsets with cameras, media players, instant messaging apps, e-mail clients, Web browsers, Bluetooth and GPS that all some people want in a cell phone is... a cell phone."

All I have to add is, "Well, DUH!!!" Kudos to Moto for being the first(?) cellphone maker to realize that some of us haven't the need, desire, time or $$$ for a phone with Swiss-army-knife capability and VCR-level complexity. I just want to talk on the damn thing, not take pictures, play music, text-message people, send e-mail etc., etc., etc. (Okay, the games function is useful when waiting on something and not driving, but that's it. And I miss being able to play Snake II on the old phone. Dangit.) If this phone's sales take off as I believe they will, consider it a message to all those pencil-necked geeks with too much time on their hands and too much processing power to play with who seem to have been put in charge of designing almost all the electronics that rule our lives today: namely, that just because a device can have 200 different functions does not mean it needs to.

Comments

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Some of us actually have a use for those functions. *shrug*

I'm glad you were able to find a phone that suited your needs, though.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

For a long time now, people have been hoping that computers would become as easy to use as their phones.

Now it's happened: it takes three years to learn to use the telephone, and by that time, it's broken and obsolete and time to get and learn a new one ;-)

I don't use all of my phone's functions, but I have had to use some on occasion, and it's handy to have, say, an alarm clock or calculator or notepad on my hip at all times. But I can see where someone else might not.

[cellio]

I, too, want a simple phone. I specifically want a phone without a camera, because a camera can cause problems at work in some circumstances; this turned out to be somewhat challenging when I last shopped.