"Beep... a Phone? No, a Brick".
"While that Nokia 'butterfly- button' phone was the must- have phone over a decade ago, some users complain that Nokia phones are 'too hi-tech' to use these days." - New Nokia Phone Gets Back to Basics, The New Paper, 5th October 2007.
I recall the frenzy my friends and I experienced when the Nokia phone was launched. It was missing all the commodities like the camera function, colour screen, mp3 player et cetera but back then it was the state of the art. It was how it was meant to be. I recall giving my best friend Syafiq's new butterfly phone the G-shock treatment by nonchalantly flinging it out of his mom's 2nd storey flat. Syafiq's still using the phone today, by the way.
I recall having to save up my pocket money by skipping breakfast, lunch and dinner to buy the phone. As a consequence, while adolescent boys are expected to grow, I actually started to shrink at 15. And I didn't buy the phone at the end. I bought a year's supply of McDonald's Happy Meals instead as a form of retribution to myself.
If you've been around a while, you'd realise that mobile phones go a long way back to a time when they truly look like bricks. Large, unbearably heavy and emitting intolerably huge amounts of radiation, these phones might be the cause for an upward trend of penile disorder in the early 1990's. They had a wonderfully long, thick, sturdy antennas which you can use for peripheral purposes like picking your nose, or satisfying your girlfriend.
My mother was far from joking though when she remarked that if only she owns one of these brick phones, she could use it as a weapon against would-be assailants . As a law student a few years back, I read about a few cases where people were charged for assaulting or severely injuring another person by whacking them using their mobile brick phones. As the phone was an expensive luxury, those accused all seem to be well to do: an associate professor, a doctor and an ex-politician.
To complement the brick phone's very conspicuous look, it came with very conspicuous pricetag which only the rich people up Nassim Hill could afford. And phone bills didn't come cheap either. Just a short call to say hello would cost a fortune, I was informed. It was a time when Singtel was the only telco around so they had all the monopoly. No one knew about M1, and Starhub hadn't even come into existence. It would probably be cheaper to pry out those huge 10 cent public phones off their wall socket and lug it around town.
I noticed how Chinese businessmen used to drag the brick phone around like some status symbol, but I've never seen any of these blokes actually use them. Like a stamp of their status and authority, they would at times pretend to talk (loudly) into the phone when clearly no one was at the other end, as confessed by my friend's father recently.
It was, according to him, the best phone he ever owned. He described how he would walk around Orchard Road and earned all those admiring glances. He felt sublime. But brick phone short-circuited on him one afternoon when it slightly drizzled.
I recall the frenzy my friends and I experienced when the Nokia phone was launched. It was missing all the commodities like the camera function, colour screen, mp3 player et cetera but back then it was the state of the art. It was how it was meant to be. I recall giving my best friend Syafiq's new butterfly phone the G-shock treatment by nonchalantly flinging it out of his mom's 2nd storey flat. Syafiq's still using the phone today, by the way.
I recall having to save up my pocket money by skipping breakfast, lunch and dinner to buy the phone. As a consequence, while adolescent boys are expected to grow, I actually started to shrink at 15. And I didn't buy the phone at the end. I bought a year's supply of McDonald's Happy Meals instead as a form of retribution to myself.
If you've been around a while, you'd realise that mobile phones go a long way back to a time when they truly look like bricks. Large, unbearably heavy and emitting intolerably huge amounts of radiation, these phones might be the cause for an upward trend of penile disorder in the early 1990's. They had a wonderfully long, thick, sturdy antennas which you can use for peripheral purposes like picking your nose, or satisfying your girlfriend.
My mother was far from joking though when she remarked that if only she owns one of these brick phones, she could use it as a weapon against would-be assailants . As a law student a few years back, I read about a few cases where people were charged for assaulting or severely injuring another person by whacking them using their mobile brick phones. As the phone was an expensive luxury, those accused all seem to be well to do: an associate professor, a doctor and an ex-politician.
To complement the brick phone's very conspicuous look, it came with very conspicuous pricetag which only the rich people up Nassim Hill could afford. And phone bills didn't come cheap either. Just a short call to say hello would cost a fortune, I was informed. It was a time when Singtel was the only telco around so they had all the monopoly. No one knew about M1, and Starhub hadn't even come into existence. It would probably be cheaper to pry out those huge 10 cent public phones off their wall socket and lug it around town.
I noticed how Chinese businessmen used to drag the brick phone around like some status symbol, but I've never seen any of these blokes actually use them. Like a stamp of their status and authority, they would at times pretend to talk (loudly) into the phone when clearly no one was at the other end, as confessed by my friend's father recently.
It was, according to him, the best phone he ever owned. He described how he would walk around Orchard Road and earned all those admiring glances. He felt sublime. But brick phone short-circuited on him one afternoon when it slightly drizzled.
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posted by The Reluctant Chauvinist at
6:21 AM
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