Cell Phone Lost
Last November, I bought a Samsung Haptic 2. It was my first touch phone and took a little getting used to. But before too long, I was hooked. It’s a fairly high end phone, costing around $600. Rather than paying up front, I opted to tack on monthly payments to my phone bill for 24 months. Then this past Tuesday, I left it in the back seat of a taxi.
Because I nearly always listen to my iPod when I’m out and about, and because I nearly always missed calls when the phone was in my pocket, I generally carried it in one hand or the other. Though I did occasionally put it in my back pocket. And I was always careful to make sure I didn’t leave it lying around somewhere. Tuesday morning, I decided to grab a cab to get to my morning class, even though I had enough time to walk down to the bus stop and catch a bus like I normally do. On the way, I saw the aftermath of a pretty horrific traffic accident, fairly close up. If you are the morbid type, you can see footage of the crash, involving a bus and a car, on YouTube.
No, I didn’t see the dead driver. Nor any blood or guts. Just a crushed car in the middle of the bus lane and a bus sitting atop the entrance to a pedestrian underpass across the street on the sidewalk. But something about it shook me up. I’ve seen a few accidents before, not to mention some of the nastiness I saw when I worked in an Army emergency room. Nothing had ever affected me like this, though. I just felt this overwhelming sympathy for the person, or people, inside that car. I was lost in thought, not realizing that I had dropped my cell phone on the seat. A couple of minutes later, I arrived at my destination.
At this point, I shook out of my reverie and fished one of the new 50,000 won bills from my wallet. Of course, the driver had no change. I was rather annoyed by that, as I had wanted to deposit some smaller bills in an ATM between the cab and the office. Not all ATMs accept the new 50s yet. So I absentmindedly dropped the 50 in my lap and paid with a smaller bill. Just before I started to get out, I remembered the 50 in my lap and picked it up. As the taxi sped away, I reached into my back pocket for my cell phone. Damn!
The taxi was too far gone by this point, so I hurried on to the office. After checking in with security and waiting for someone to come down and escort me up (yeah, security at the rather new Samsung Electronics building is tight), I asked my student’s secretary to call my cell. That’s when I discovered that someone had turned it off. I knew then that I wasn’t going to get it back.
My job pretty much requires a cell phone. Classes get canceled and rescheduled. My number gets passed around and new classes come along from time to time. So as soon as the telecom shop nearest my house opened after my class, I was there. After I was told that I would have to switch telecoms if I bought another Haptic 2, I decided to go for something different. I’m quite happy with SK Telecom, but the others still can make things a bit uncomfortable for foreigners. I finally settled on the most expensive model they had, the Samsung T*Omnia.
This is a local version of the Samsung Omnia, which they sell overseas, and it goes for nearly $800. It’s a PDA/Smartphone, powered by Windows XP Mobile. I certainly don’t need a PDA. The major selling point for me, though, was the Wi-Fi networking. With other cell phones in Korea, internet usage is metered based on data transfer. It adds up quickly, and after a certain point they cut you off for the rest of the month. Since I don’t have a laptop, and have no plans to buy one in the near future, this would have been the ideal thing for me during down time between classes. But it was not to be.
The first issue I encountered was confusion over how to get an English version of Windows installed. This wasn’t a blocker, but a huge annoyance. My Korean tech vocabulary isn’t so hot. First I was told it was no problem, I could just go to a service center and they would handle it. At the service center, I was told it’s impossible. Then the guy at the phone shop where I bought it did some digging around and said he could do it from his shop. By that point, after having played around with the phone for a few hours, I decided just to get a different one. The main issues for me were that the interface was klunky and slow, there were several issues with the Wi-Fi, and a couple of applications I had come to rely on were not present. Given time, I’m sure I could have worked around the Wi-Fi problems, downloaded some apps I needed, and maybe would have come to like it. But the performance was a killer.
So, I settled for the second most expensive phone in the shop, the recently launched Samsung Haptic AMOLED. Any anger I had felt with myself for having lost my phone disappeared as soon as I got this baby in my hands. It’s essentially an improved version of the Haptic 2, with most of the same applications and features, but with an upgraded user interface and several improvements. This is, without a doubt, the best cell phone I’ve ever owned. I was hoping to buy an iPhone at some point, but I don’t care now. I have another 24-month payment plan, plus I still have 16 months remaining on the phone I lost, so I won’t be on the market for another phone for a couple of years yet. Assuming I don’t lose this one.