Piece for KnowYourMobile Job - Why Did You Buy Your Phone? 15/09/2013
HTC Desire C (or why
I didn’t buy an I-Phone)
For years I had to listen to everyone saying how great the
I-Phone was while I cradled my reliable, battle hardened but ultimately obsolete
Nokia and pretended I didn’t care that I couldn’t afford anything better.
Gushing statements that I was genuinely on the receiving end
of included:
“I can’t believe I ever lived without an I-Phone!”
“It has changed my life!”
“It’s the most important thing I’ve ever owned!”
And so on.
Starry eyed with excitement I tried to think what other inventions
in human history could boast similar glowing references. The plough?
Perhaps the commode? How would an
I-Phone compete with these?
Could it
magically transport my piss into the toilet without me realising it? Would it feed me while I slept? I was sceptical. Besides these were the same people who were
telling me how good Lost and Dan Brown were.
When it came to choosing a new phone I decided there were
six desirable qualities I wanted.
1) Durability
I drop things.
Not all the time like Joe Hart or Bez, but enough to make me
realise that whichever phone I chose needed to be able to withstand the occasional
kamikaze nosedive from the safety of my pocket to the unforgiving concrete of
the floor. There wasn’t an easy way to
test this as the staff in the stores I visited seemed tired and eventually
irritated by my repeated requests to test every device they handed me by
dropping it from a height while standing on a chair. So instead I had to recall personal memories
of friends who had shown me their unreadable cracked I-Phone screens and their
unusable I-Phone split keypads and wonder whether the I-Phone was really for
me.
Further research concluded that another phone, the HTC
Desire C, while far from the bomb proof husk that my old Nokia Brick provided
me back in the 00s, was nonetheless durable and able to withstand shock impacts
that would render many of its competitors unusable. I reasoned I was unlikely to subject my new
phone to the same routine pummelling that, as a carefree young scamp high on
booze and excitement, I had once subjected my Nokia to; but at the same time
there was perhaps still enough booze and excitement in my life to rule out
something as apparently delicate and fragile as an I-Phone.
HTC Desire C – 1
I-Phone – 0
2) Music Storage
At the time I was looking to buy a new phone I had recently been
parted from the functioning possession of my I-pod Classic after it exploded
into several interesting, but no less heart-breaking, pieces on my apartment
floor after a booze ridden night of excitement sat in watching Wimbledon on
television. I decided that whichever phone I committed to
next would have to also replace my beloved, now deceased, 32GB I-pod Classic.
Again here I looked at I-Phones for a long time, noting that
to get 32GB of storage took the price up from a basic £200 to a whopping £500.
I dug around a little and found that some phones, like the
HTC Desire C, supported SD cards which could ramp the storage space up to equal
the 32GB of a top of the range I-Phone, but at a fraction of the cost.
The HTC Desire C also came with the Dr Dre Beats audio bass
booster which, unlike the obscenely overpriced Dr Dre Beats headphones, you can
turn off whenever you want to listen to something that isn’t meant to be
piledriven into your ears.
HTC Desire C – 2
I-Phone – 0
3) Camera
You never know when the cat is going to vomit or a friend
is about to be happy slapped and I decided I wanted to capture these treasured
memories with a picture quality that wouldn’t turn out looking like a deleted scene in Paranormal Activity .
Again I undertook painstaking research (okay it’s the Internet) to
deduce which phone would have an acceptable camera for what I wanted – i.e. very
basic photography.
Nowadays I-Phones have a standard 8 Mega Pixel camera included
as standard but back in the far distant days of early 2012 the 5MP camera of
the HTC Desire C was as good as the 5MP camera on the I-Phone 4 and superior to
the 3.2MP camera of the I-Phone 3GS.
Again it was difficult to see what advantage an I-Phone would
give me here…
HTC Desire C – 3
I-Phone – 0
4) Football Manager Handheld
In 2012 when I was looking for a new phone I was actually living
in Mauritius without a computer or an internet connection in my house. My days off work were spent lounging on a
tropical beach reading and drinking cocktails and yet…something was
missing. No computer meant no Football
Manager to occupy my waking thoughts and without this there was always going to
be a hole in my life that needed to be filled.
So when Apple announced they were releasing Football Manager
Handheld on the I-Phone it threw all my previous logical reasoning out of the
window in favour of the inexorable purchase of an I-Phone Whatever.
Until Android announced they were bringing Football Manager
Handheld to the HTC Desire C.
HTC Desire C – 4
I-Phone – 1
5) Price
HTC Desire C - £100
I-Phone 4 - £500
I-Phone 3GS – £300
HTC Desire C – 5
I-Phone – 1
6) Conclusion
What tipped the final balance was when I realised with
horror that I had forgotten to check if any of these devices could actually
make a phone call or receive a text message.
Desperately I went back to my research (yes alright the
Internet) and promptly read an article that suggested the I-Phone 4 had
‘difficulties maintaining conversations if held incorrectly’.
With the final score a convincing 6-1 to HTC I packed away
my charts and proudly marched to my local store to demand they fit my pocket
with an HTC Desire C.
The store assistant smiled at me.
“Good choice sir,” he said, resting a reassuring hand gently
on my arm, “Good choice”.
N.B. James is now
planning to ditch his slow laggy HTC Desire C for an I-Phone Whatever which
will enable him to use Garage Band and all the other apps he is currently using
‘second rate versions of’ on his HTC.
