Brick phones are all the rage now

I found this piece of news interesting and refreshing. It seems that a rebooted version of the old Nokia mobile phone is back on the market. It’s been nicknamed ‘the brick phone’, rather unfairly I think. A brick phone is a phone that does absolutely nothing; no phone calls, no text messages, has no internet connection and, in the original meaning of the word, it does not even turn on, rather like a brick which, actually is more useful than a real brick phone.

It’s interesting to me how the old Nokia is now in so much demand, or phones like it, for that matter. The only function a phone such as that will perform is to enable phone calls to be made and text messages to be sent.

The very first smartphone to appear was the famous Blackberry with its pioneering emailing capabilities and the ability to download various Apps. Years later when people began to complain that their phone had stopped connecting to a Wi-Fi signal, others likened it to a brick and said it had been ‘bricked’ even though calls could still be made and received, text messages could be sent and received and photos and videos could be taken.

Granted, they were low quality but they could be stored on an SD card and transferred to a laptop for processing.  In fact, I am proud to admit that I am the owner of just such a phone. It was given to me by my late father in 2013. The device stopped connecting to a Wi-Fi some years ago but I love it just the same because of who gave it to me.

I know I’m using it to detox from social media or today’s smartphones because I have another device to keep me connected. I can, however, understand people’s need to escape from the constant barrage of information that invariably comes with a smartphone which everyone is compelled to look at every time it pings.

Therefore, having a ‘brick phone’ is the perfect answer to temporarily severing contact with online contacts they barely know or have never met. In fact, people are more drawn to a brick phone now because of their fear of being tracked or the camera watching or the microphone listening in on their conversations.

I think old is always better. Recently someone on Twitter once asked their followers what the make and model of the first car they ever owned was. You know, some people just post inane tweets that have no real purpose, except to get likes, comments and retweets and, who know, maybe even a follow. Aside from that, it did get me thinking about the cars I drove.

I’ve never owned a car and I don’t have a car now. The two I drove were hired for me by my previous employers. They were the same make but slightly different models. It got me thinking that I really preferred the older model because the later one had a significant flaw in the driver’s seat. Whereas in the previous model, I could adjust the seat to as far forward as I needed it to be, I could also raise it as high as I needed to. Not so with the newer model.

I could move it forward just like in the previous version but its height was fixed; I could not raise it which meant that people who were not so tall could barely see over the car bonnet. I had to use a thick cushion to raise me to the right height, and I’m around 5ft to 2 in! Why on earth was the height of the seat fixed at the lowest level? It’s almost as if it was only designed for tall people!

And still on the subject of cars, this brings me to another amusing car problem that came to the attention of its manufacturer this year.

Now cast your mind back to the year 1999. Back then, the biggest buzz word was Y2K and the greatest fear on the planet was that our computers would crash if we didn’t do something about it. Tech companies and businesses spent millions holding conferences and seminars and enlisting the help of IT experts to find the solution to the potential problem of their computer clocks defaulting to the year 1900 instead of 2000.

They claimed that it would wreak havoc with everything in the world including airlines and power grids which would crash. I never paid much attention to it and never installed any patch or software updates which, if you remember, at the time, came on CDs and not online. When the clock struck midnight on 31st December 1999, my laptop date turned into…2000! So I don’t know what all that was about.

But owners of the car in question, and I can’t remember which make it was, have complained that their car clocks are now stuck in the year 2002, a problem that can’t be fixed until August of this year. Apparently it is a software glitch. Perhaps people should have been prepping for Y22K! And, from the perspective of the cars’ owners, it’s not at all amusing.