So yeah, I’ve got the whole personal technology/gadget fetish thing going on. No shame in that. Or at least, if there should be shame in that, I haven’t felt it.
A while ago, at the beginning of spring, when a young man’s fancy turns to big screen TV’s, I considered replacing my brick-sized Treo 600 phone with something newer and smaller. But I got over it. I got the Treo mostly just because it was the hot new gadget at the time, but it turned out to be pretty practical and do everything I needed. It’s pretty big, but not all that cumbersome, and it’s nice having access to mapquest from anywhere, or to be able to write notes or send & receive text messages with a full keyboard.
So of course now the phone has crapped out on me. It’s still 99.9% functional, except for the one thing you need from a phone, which is to be able to actually hear the person on the other end. I’m not sure if it can be repaired, but if past experience with Palm is any indication, repairing it is as expensive as getting a new (cheaper) phone. Plus, a tour of Palm’s website last night gave me the impression that the Treo 600 is already — just over a year since it came out, keep in mind — old news, and trying to repair it would be like taking a hamster to the vet.
The thing that pisses me off the most is that I’ve got a perfectly valid excuse to blow some cash on a new gadget, and I don’t want to. A new crop of phones is just about to come out, so whatever I get is going to be outdated within a month or two. Whatever I get is going to be smaller, sure, but most likely with a more cumbersome interface. And of course, it’s been a couple of months now since I left EA, so I don’t have the double bonus of a steady stream of income plus no free time to spend money, which means my bank account balance just keeps getting smaller.
The lesson learned, I suppose, is not to spend so much money on a damn cell phone in the first place. Now if I can just keep that in mind when I go out this morning and buy a new one.