I did it. It is done. After 4+ years of servitude, on July 11, 2008, I replaced my old cell phone for an iPhone 3G .

Back in the early 2000s I was still a bit of a cell phone snob. I didn’t believe people actually needed cell phones. People who used cell phones were just bad planners, I thought. I was a good planner. I was still waiting for the perfect device, one with voice, camera, mp3 playback, internet, memory for media and a color screen so I wouldn’t have to carry all those devices separately. The Handspring Visor Prism came close, but it was too clunky and so big it almost bordered on sidetalking.

The Toshiba VM4050 was one of the best phones out there in early 2004. It had a sturdy build, a decent camera, a colorful, high-quality screen, access to the web, and a clean and customizable interface. I got mine and I convinced several friends to get the same. Over the years I took over 3500 pictures with the onboard camera (50% up girl’s skirts), used the phone all over the country (including Hawaii and Puerto Rico), tethered it to my laptop on trips for desperate mobile internets and twirled, threw and abused it like dog’s favorite bone.

All the years and abuse were not kind. The charging port stopped working over a year ago. I took it to a Sprint store and they declared it unrepairable. I wasn’t ready to give up on it though. Having so many friends with the same phone paid off, as one accidentally broke the hinge and had to get a new phone. So he gave me his broken shell of a phone and I used it to charge the battery for my phone, swapping the batteries in and out every couple nights. When I went on trips, I would take both phones with me because I needed one to charge the other. It was ridiculous(ly cool).

Other things went wrong, I got water on the phone and the ringer volume buttons stopped working. That made for an embarrassing moment in a quiet theatre at Sundance. Specks of plastic were coming off the inside of the camera lens housing, depositing big black splotches in my pictures. And yet the phone soldiered on. I willed it to continue living. I was in control of the DNR papers and I said suscitate.

iphone 3gBut now it’s finally time to say goodbye. It was strange, even after buying the iPhone, I was still preferring to use the old phone (I have a bit of overlapping carrier contract). But that balance has pretty much shifted 180 now. The iPhone still isn’t the perfect convergence device I’ve been waiting for, but it’s getting there. I’ll post my impressions of the iPhone 3G on here soon. In the meantime, it’s about time to pull the plug on the trusty VM4050. Or rather, since the charge plug doesn’t work, stop swapping those stupid batteries.

One Response to “Welcome to the Present, Me”

  1. May Wangon 22 Dec 2009 at 12:41 am

    Eric, u r so funny.

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