(Images hotlinked so they may vanish without notice) K800i died after about 6 months of use W910 destroyed in under a week (it was the single worst electronic item I have ever owned) C902 the current contender Considering that I have only had 5 phones in my life (I only buy a new one whenever the old one breaks) having 3 of those in a single week seems excessive.
Electronics just keep getting more fragile. Long gone are the days when you could practically break a NES controller in half and fix it with duct tape. I make it a rule to never buy a telephone if it's got too much gadgetry to it. A phone is something you use when you to call other people, add cameras and gps's and mp3 players and kitchen blenders and you only have more stuff with the potential to break.
I don't care for the camera (in fact if I use it in certain areas I'll probably get arrested), but I need the mp3 player and the loudest internal speaker possible so I have something to listen to at work; There is so much concrete in Parliament House that radio signals can't get through and there is a ban on headphones in the workplace as they are seen as an OH&S issue. And I still remember my Dad kicking my SNES so hard at a wall it broke in half, I just pushed the wires back inside, clicked the casing back together and was good to go.
Wow...I think that's a testament to Nintendo and their immortal hardware. I once dropped a gameboy in the toilet. All I had to do was take out the batteries and let it dry out, and it still worked great. It fell in before the water was made unsanitary. The Sony Ericsson...It almost seems like they're trying to drag you through that entire branch of their product line.
Well, you can't blame Sony Ericsson entirely... I had two of their phones, that's predicessor, the W810i, and a t637? I believe? Both of those were absolutely iron-clad. Both of them survived countless drops, several dunks in a river (unintentional, and both phones), and one of them got kicked very accurately into the back of someone's head (w810i).
Of the 5 phones I've had I have only been directly responsible for busting numbers 2 (snapped it in half in a fit of rage) and 4 (took an unexpected swim). Numbers 1 & 3 genuinely wore out although number 1 lasted a little over 3 years. And the dedication to Sony Ericsson is just because I have one of their proprietary M2 cards and it won't fit any other phone.
Coming to think of it, one of the Sony Ericsson's I've had, which was probably manufactured back in the good old days when it was just Ericsson, surived a ride through the washing machine and several drops of about 3 meters down on a hard concrete floor... just had to reassemble the parts that flew all over the place and it worked just fine. Expects a cellphone version of the four yorkshiremen to follow.
I've gotten the Sprint Instinct and it died last week during a firmware update. It's now a very expensive brick. Still under warranty, but dammit, 2 weeks without a phone while they fix it is hell!
I just love it when you have to hit a piece of technology to make it work again. Sadly, most gadgets nowadays are so fragile they fragment upon impact. Thank heavens for the 'it was broken anyway' motto.
People were always dumb. It's just that there are more people now than it used to be and therefore the world as a whole is getting dumber at an exponential rate.
Also the technology is getting more fragile. If I take my now 8 year old motorola cell phone and throw it into a wall, it'll still work just like it did before. If I do that to my, in comparison, new SonyEricsson phone, it will break.
I learned from the old Playstation days to never trust Sony hardware ever again. That includes consoles, phones, and blenders.
