A Decade of Being a Cell Phone User

I think it has been a decade since the first time I got a cell phone. I knew someone at high school having it. It was, as far as my memory serves right, Motorola product. Bulky, pitch black, dull, rather cumbersome kind of thing with an antenae. It might be some day in 2004, when I was in my junior year at college. My younger sister got one, my father too. But I was not particularly interested in having and using this then-pricey technology product. There were not many people using it, so that was quite useless to have one. I thought I could survive without it, throughout my life. Plus, I knew from the very beginning some health risks the cell phone poses us to. I was, am and will always be cautious about how the use of cell phone changes my life and most importantly my own well being and health.

Still, I got myself one. It was my father who bought me a second-hand Nokia 3315. It was one of the most widely purchased handsets in the country. I can tell you how dull it was. The alphanumeric keypad, narrow monochrome display that was unbeatably boring, thickness that won’t make you impressed. But no one can deny its battery longevity. One of the longest, probably. The Nokia was Internet enabled but I was never thinking accessing the web on such a minute object would be a cool experience.

Then I had another second-hand phone, Siemens (model I forgot completely). The phone was considerably smaller and lighter and it featured polyphonic ringtones, which still had a great selling point in the market. I could access the web through wap. But it was so horrible and expensive, because downloading a few hundred kilobytes might cost me 10,000 rupiahs, which I considered a robbery! The operator charged us based on volume of data, which was said to be 1000/kb. And please don’t complain about the speed. It took me more than 15 minutes to download an audio file which then was sold as polyphonic ringtones. I should say 15 minutes for downloading a file smaller than 100 kb was a record. Crappy and hugely disappointing, I know.