New Cell Phone

When I was staying with my Mum and Dad in California we played golf.  It was a beautiful day, but by the time we finished it got really hot.  I was trying to call the office that day because I had a couple of things that needed to be done, despite the fact that I was technically on vacation.  So I put my cellphone in my swimming shorts and went to watch my son play in the pool.  Eventually, of course, he convinced me to go in the water.  So, three-week-old phone, completely kaput.

Since my cellphone is also my only camera, I wanted a replacement.  And I didn’t want to wait, because we were going to all sorts of cool places, leaving the next day.  I figured that since I had to buy a new phone anyway, I might as well get the one I wanted.  So I got one of these:

Casio G’zOne Type-V Cell Phone

There are a lot of things I love about it.  It’s shock-resistant and water resistant.  It has a cool, odd, steampunk sort of look to it.  It is big, and easy to hold without accidentally pushing buttons best left unpushed.  It isn’t as shiny as other phones, has a sort of matte finish on the parts that you touch, so it doesn’t look greasy all the time.  It has some sort of hardware or software glitch, too, the result of which is that about half of the time people call me I only get word after the fact.  I could be staring at the phone and suddenly it will say I missed a call.  I particularly love this feature–I can avoid so many unwanted, inconvenient conversations.

One of the things that drove me a little nuts about it, though, is the fact that Verizon and Casio claim that it takes 2.0 megapixel pictures.  I say claim  because I am unable to verify it.  There is a setting on the phone for taking such pictures, but there is no way to download them afterward (no cable) and the phone won’t send it over the Verizon network (Verizon apparently only lets you send files smaller than 370k.)  So I wonder why they didn’t just claim to take 20 megapixel pictures, or 100, for that matter. You certainly would never be able to prove them wrong.

I went to the Verizon store in South Nashua, New Hampshire yesterday, to inquire into some other problems with my account, etc., which might be too complicated to describe adequately for the purposes of this blog (I say this because it took a considerable amount of time to explain it to their presumably trained staff.)  The people there, including both managers, the technical staff, and others (I talked to six different people) were so uniformly and monolithically (paleolithically?) unhelpful that I thought I’d make a special note of it here.  The little visit ended without accomplishing anything except the cancellation of part of my service contract, but with the suggestion, on the part of the manager, that I purchase a cable that some company has now come out with to download pictures from these things.  “It’s only $29.00,” she told me (and another guy that was there looking into the same problem), so that should solve the problem.” 

Depends how you define the problem, I guess.  The phone has only two ports.  One is for the headphone, the other for recharging.  I didn’t ask them where to stick the cable.  They can stick it themselves.