Egypt - My First Phone

Hurghada Mosque - Taken With My New Mobile Phone

You may have noticed in yesterday's blog that I mentioned using a phone to text, so yes, I have finally taken my new mobile out of its box. I can’t really say I’ve got the hang of it yet. Most people would be very excited, no doubt, but I’m tired of reading the instruction booklet umpteen times. I almost wonder if I should have just gone for the basic phone. Having said that, once I’ve got it set up how I want, with easy access to my email and to my share prices, and I’m competent at using the camera, I may warm to it. But I’m some way off that point just now.

The phone, too, has made me feel foreign. Each time it connects to a network, it notifies me in Arabic. At least, that’s what I assume it’s doing when I get various messages in Arabic. I can’t really understand why the mobile doesn’t notify me in English, when I've already told it that my language is English. I’m not convinced the phone is so smart.

By the way, that reminds me, the advertisements on my laptop are now often also in Arabic. And there have been a few times when I’ve bought something and, although there is English on the box, the instructions inside are only in Arabic. I know this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did!

There’s lots that irritates me about the phone.

It vibrates any time I do something. I wish it would stop.

The screen is very sensitive and as I’m dithering, I will suddenly find myself in a new application, because the phone has interpreted my dithering as a decision. I have finally worked out where the back button and the home button are, so at least now I know how to get back to where I was.

 If I carry the phone around, the screen display orientation changes. For some reason, I find this quite confusing. There’s an old IT joke that goes “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”. That’s how I feel. For me, it’s not a feature, it’s a bug.

Shall I go on? Yes, let me go on…

I tried for an entire evening to download whatsapp, but each time I ended up with an error message. One of those that explains it’s error 43 or whatever, which means absolutely nothing. Why do they bother with those messages? How many people phone the company and say they have Error 43? Can’t they explain a bit about what's gone wrong rather than just saying Error 43? Again, it’s really not very clever.

 Also, I can’t understand why people are so keen on apps. I tried to get the weather one to work, but instead I downloaded it in triplicate. It’s not even as if I need it – the forecast is always going to be “hot and sunny” – I just thought it would be a cheerful thing to look at. After yet another search through the instructions, I discovered that I should drag the app into the delete icon. Could I see a delete icon? No! I finally realised that you had to move the app before the icon showed. That’s just plain confusing, if you ask me.

There’s this thing called vibrer on my phone too. At first, I thought this was an app to make my phone vibrate, so I wanted to delete it. However, I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. In the end, I realised that it wasn’t an app to make my phone vibrate at all, it was just a local whatsapp type thing. It kept on asking me to register, so I finally relented. No sooner had I registered then I had a text message from the guy from the phone shop saying “Hello Fiona!” He was probably being nice, but I just felt it was another mistake on my part. I should never have registered…

I did manage to get my email up and running, so that is one thing done. However, the keyboard is a bit frustrating as my fat fingers always hit the wrong letters. I tried to enlarge the keyboard screen by doing the appropriate twanging with my fingers, but nothing happened, so I guess that facility isn’t available for the keyboard. Again, so much for the smart phone.

I followed the instructions and tried placing my hand over the screen to send my mobile to sleep, but instead yet another text message suddenly popped up on my screen. I’d obviously pressed something by mistake. I was too freaked out to study the text message and decided just to shut the phone down before anything else went wrong.

How do people ever learn how to make these things work?