Set Higher Standards by YogiRavi

The past month or so has been a technological disaster for me. First my hard drive blows up. Then, my phone stops working.

I have a 18 month old (i.e. out-of-warranty) Palm Treo 650. I love the device. It has taken a ton of abuse. I’ve never bothered to get one of those nice cushy covers for it either.

I’ve never been a huge cellphone talker, but of late, I have been quite the mobile e-mail addict.

Two weeks ago, out of the blue, the keys stopped working. The touch-screen worked fine, but the keyboard was busted.

I tried a warm-reset, soft-reset, hard-reset and nothing worked! The only functioning button was the power key to turn the screen on/off.

I finally figured out (after 3 or 4 days of aggravation) that one of my keys was permanently depressed. Not manic-depressed….permanently depressed.

If I flicked the key several times, and then quickly pressed the unlock button, the phone would work normally! This sequence, harder than the cheat code for Mortal Combat III, was incredibly annoying to keep up every time I made a call.

I finally broke down and dismantled my Treo to figure out what was going on. I unscrewed everything and removed the cover. I then removed the main circuit board to reveal the keypad. Yup….the shift key in the lower-right corner was totally done.

So….I went in to Verizon, and the good chaps that they are, offered to replace it for only $50. Since my phone was out of warranty, this was a great deal.

I had to wait about a week for a new phone. I was essentially cellphone-less during this time and guess what…I didn’t die!

So now I have my new phone….with only one issue, for some reason my phone didn’t synch all my contacts with my Beta version of Outlook 2007. This is a known issue and palm is aware of it

So now, half of my contacts completely gone, and the rest are on my computer and won’t synch to my phone. Oh well…if they are that important they will call me…right?

While I could export the contacts from Outlook to something else and synch from there…I just decided not to bother for a few weeks. I wanted to see how much I really miss not using my phone that much.

So I have a nice workable phone but haven’t been using it too much the past few weeks. Some folks have called me. And I have called a couple people, but I have stopped texting and sending lots of picture messages. I just haven’t committed that many numbers to memory!

I have also not bothered to setup e-mail access on my phone.

It has been incredibly refreshing. I don’t miss it at all.