Newness!

So yesterday I was in a shopping mall and stopped by a phone store to ask about the issues I've been having with my phone's display screen. "We can repair it in one or two hours for you," the guy said confidently. "That'll be RM100."

Hmmm.

He said it is a common problem all slider phones encounter sooner or later -- WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY TELL ME THIS -- something about contact problems, the ribbon getting dislodged over time as you keep sliding the screen section up and down. I told him I've had this phone since May 2009 and he said I was very lucky the screen had lasted that long! Some people, he claimed, run into this problem after a year.

I got distracted by the shiny all around me and started looking at the new phones. I've used Nokia forever because it was the most user-friendly phone way back when, and once I'm comfortable with something I don't switch, unless I've powerful reason to. The iPhone is a pretty powerful reason, but its price is also a pretty powerful deterrent!

Trying out the Nokia 300's touchscreen, I commented it wasn't as sensitive as the iPhone's. "Of course not -- you can't compare an RM400 phone with something that costs five times that!" exclaimed the guy. Point taken.

But what really decided me was when I discovered that you can't set any shortcut to go directly into composing text messages. I text a lot and this is one of the features I use the most on my current phone: Once the keypad is unlocked, all it takes is one press of the left centre button and I'm immediately in compose mode. On the touchscreen phone you need to go to Messages, then Compose, and with the fiddliness of the screen sensitivity, it's just not as convenient. So I got the non-touchscreen Nokia C2-01. Sticking with a dumb phone for now :p