On Vox: Hanging on the telephone
Sony Ericsson w710i
I own a Sony Ericsson w710i. It's probably one of the best mobile phones I've had. It's aesthetically pleasing, has a huge built-in memory (which means I don't get perpetual messages that my SMS inbox is "over 95% full"), and has a bunch of features that I never use. It only costs £25 a month, too, which is fantastic.
But enough with the promoting. I've had it for... maybe four months now. Four months is not a long time, especially since I have an eighteen month contract with O2. So the phone should physically endure for over a year and a half, right?
Wrong.
Dead wrong. See that dark-grey strip that surrounds the front of the phone? The wider bits that are level with the smaller screen have buttons underneath, which can be used to mute the ringing, start the walkman, etc, etc, and they're quite useful. That whole dark-grey band is made of one piece of rubber. One piece of rubber that has detatched itself from the rest of the phone.
It's worse than it looks
I gotta stress that I don't thrash this phone about. It goes into my pocket -- not my back pocket, either, so I'm not sitting on it -- and comes out of my pocket. When it's not in my pocket, it sits on my desk or similar flat surfaces. I'm not clumsy enough to drop my phone, so this problem has occured over a few months.
It shouldn't do that
In this picture I'm deliberately pushing the rubber out of place with my thumb, but you can see how much of it has lost its adhesion. I don't know what was originally holding it in place. There's no residual glue or anything there, and it doesn't clip back into place -- it's free to dangle about if I hold it downwards, and that's alarming.
I'll give Sony Ericsson a ring after dinner. Sure, I could fix it myself with a bit of superglue, but, as I learned with my old television remote, glueing rubber onto plastic results in the buttons not working at all. I'm not going to risk losing my warranty on the phone by going all MacGyver on it. Yet I don't want to have to send it off for repair, which I'm pretty sure is what will happen. I can't have no phone for too long, as my mobile is my primary method of contact.
I don't even know if it's still in warranty. It should be after only four months, right?
Oh, yeah, I probably should mention that I bought a webcam today. I know it's against everything I stand for, but, hey, I just got some use out of it by taking those photos!
...not that I needed to take them.
Originally posted on seigerweiss.vox.com