My old Nokia

It was so long ago that I can’t even remember which Nokia model this was, but it was my first mobile phone. I don’t count the brick I briefly rented around 1994, it was very heavy not easy to use and really at the time there were few people I wanted to contact using it.

Now I got thinking about phones, and smart phones after listening to a sketch on The Now Show on BBC Radio 4.  It was a simple enough idea, the chap phones his mobile company and asks for a down grade, “to a phone which just allows you to call people, send texts and play snake with a battery which doesn’t run out by lunch time.”


All of which I suppose ranks me with the dinosaur or those people who welcomed the rule that a man with a red flag had to walk in front of motor cars.

I did try a smart phone. In fact I tried two. First I went with Nokia who I have always been with, but the screen was too small so following my partner’s advice I tried a different model only to realize that I wasn’t smart enough to use either of them.

Now one of my friends just thinks they are the bee’s knees, allowing him to send emails track where he is, where he was, and where he might want to go, along with accessing his emails, facebook and twitter. So this is the future, and my old Nokia which didn't even have a camera is as antiquated as the wireless and the telegram.

In the same way my friend Lawrence reflected on the demise of the postcard on his excellent blog, Hardy Lane Scrapbook*, http://hardylane.blogspot.com/2012/02/making-new-archives.html
“The long and short of it is they are no longer around. Eventually I did obtain an amusing one from a shop called Number 68 on Beech Road. They brought an old box of them from out of the back. Who needs postcards now - too slow to communicate, it takes days, too expensive to mail, 60p for the old card, plus 35p postage.”


Nevertheless I did downgrade back to an older Nokia which I now see has become obsolete. It is only the second I have got since that first Nokia and I still remember it with affection. It was not unlike the old Morris Minor car, simple and reliable. And unlike its smart successor could be dropped on the pavement and still work happily. The old one went on to to be used by two of my sons when their more sophisticated models gave up the ghost or were lost and is I think somewhere in the house much scratched and battered and held together with tape.

Picture; A cherished first Nokia