Two and a half years ago, I bought myself the Sony Ericsson K750i. It was an upgrade from the Pininfarina designed Samsung SGH-N400. The one with the automatic antenna gimmick. While the Samsung’s design still holds up to today’s standards, its features are sorely lacking. Probably, that’s why it never got the attention it deserved.
But anyway, this post is about my K750i. It doesn’t look bad. It has most of the features you’d want in a cellphone, it even holds up to most of the new phones. There is just one thing that bothers me. A lot. It’s the fact that it has not been designed to last. The joystick, the instrument that is your primary connection to the phone’s interface, started to break down after half a year. It was replaced, but the same thing happened again. Clearly there is a major design flaw here. After 2 years of use (just outside the 2 year guarantee we have in Belgium), the screens starts to act up. A little searching reveals that it is probably the connector which has come loose.
So what’s a guy to do. On the one hand, I have a phone that has the feature set I want and I’d like to use it for another 2 years, on the other hand, it has become totally useless because the screen is almost unreadable and the joystick is almost unusable. Sony wants you to go out and buy a new phone. For instance the K770i, has similar features, is affordable and doesn’t have a joystick. But, oh wait, it doesn’t support the Memory Stick Pro format any longer. Now you need the Memory Stick M2. So you can buy a new one of those and leave your old stick to rot.
Fed up with this whole consumerist stuff thing, I ordered myself a set of Torq screwdrivers from eBay for twelve euros (shipping included). They will supposedly help me open my phone and let me remove the dirt that’s causing the whole problem. I’ll keep you guys posted on how well that goes.
In the meantime, I’m using my Samsung again. It doesn’t have a color screen and the ringtones are oldskool beeps, but this six year old phone is still working perfectly (the battery is showing some wear and tear, but not too bad) and best of all, the joystick works like a dream.
2 Trackbacks
[...] I dabble a bit in hardware do-it-yourself from time to time, especially if it involves old-ish quality equipment that I really don’t want to replace. Many devices are created to only last a few years, which is really too bad. They usually fail in pretty straightforward ways (broken joystick on phones, lenses or driver belts on many CD/DVD players) but are very expensive to get repaired. Probably because the companies prefer that you just buy a new one. We can’t let them get away with that, now can we. [...]
[...] you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you probably already know that I like to do everything myself. It’s both for the satisfaction of having done it yourself and to save money. But recently [...]