Buying a cell phone

My needs, for me, are compartmentalized into Necessity and Vanity. Of course, there are grey areas. But I manage to keep most of if in black and white. And that, I count as a success. A very fundamental one. Where I go, what I do and what I buy are results of long, dirty fights between necessity and vanity. But I know what is where. It helps me reach compromises. It helps the cause of a cease-fire.

To recount an experience, let us take my car-hunting an year back that ended with my buying a Fiat Petra 1.6. Quite shamelessly, I love talking about it. I am a proud owner. Here's the story for you:

I want a car. Any would do. Should be spacious, sturdy, comfortable, and not very expensive. Not many would do. I like the Fiat Palio. Till now, it is a matter of necessity.
Now vanity speaks. A Palio? Don't tell me. Too common. Nothing special. You want to show off. Let me tell you. You want to show off. You must. After all, whats life without some spice?

The Palio is dumped. Budget constraints in mind, I settle for a Corsa 1.4. But want to have a look at Fiat Petra too. I walk into the Fiat showroom. There, standing right in front of me, is a shining Red Palio Sport. The Corsa killer. Its a beauty. Marry it, says vanity. Okay, I say. Its expensive. Just like Vanity wants it to be.

Necessity speaks. Spending so much on a small car? Have you sent half of your grey matter on a sabbatical? Buy the Petra. It is slightly costlier than the Red Beauty, but would keep you happier in the long run. Vanity agrees, for entirely different reasons though. Vanity loves a big car. Great show-off value. Vanity loves it when I look like a big shot.

Agreement reached. I book the Petra. Every one is happy. It is like two enemies sleeping on the same bed. Or rather, fighting for the same steering wheel.

Now, as I write it, I am in the middle of a protracted tussle between the two. I want to buy a cell phone. Till now, all my phone purchases have been necessity driven. I have been picking up from the bottom of the bin. The cheapest ones. For what is a phone for, other than to just talk. But now, fed up of carrying the stupid piece of electronics in my pocket like some dead weight, I have decided to get something that really deserves being taken everywhere. Something that is not just a rudimentary device to talk and text, but is a worthy escort. Vanity.

Being the Man of Technology that I am, I do a thorough search on the net about whats latest and best. I rule out Nokia, as I find Nokias to be too bulky, without there being any necessity for them to be so (I am writing this at a Nokia R&D site, using their workstation, their facilities, when I am supposed to be working on their 3G chip design. Talk of betrayal). There is nothing special that a 6600 or 3230 does that justifies their bulkiness. On one hand, you fight to make a transistor fit on 0.03 micron of silicon. On the other hand, you make a phone which does not get into your jeans pocket. Paradox.

My requirements are well defined. It should be a real gizmo, top of the line. The phone counterpart of an iPod. The Concord among airplanes. The Ferrari among cars. Vanity. At the same time, it should be sleek, not bulky, functional, and a performer. Necessity.

After a scan of the Indian GSM handset market, I zero in on two phones. The best Camera Phone, and the best compact PDA phone. The Sony Ericsson K750i is the former. The Sony Ericsson P910i is the latter.

The Sony Ericsson K750i has the best phone camera now, throughout the world. I do not say it because of its 2.0 Mega Pixels resolution. Only a naive camera user would say that, and I am not one. It has good optics, Auto Focus, Exposure Compensation, and automatic White Balance setting, along with an AF assist diode, that can also double up as a weak flash. If the jargon is quite a mouthful, then in simpler terms, it means that it is quite a lot for a phone camera to have. In image quality, it beats the Nokia N90 hands down, which is Nokia's best camera phone. The K750i is small, very sleek, light, and disappears into the pocket. It also plays MP3, but that does not impress me because my iPod does that much better. The grouse? It looks like any camera phone. It does not shake the earth when it comes to this department. And to certain parts of me, this department matters.

The P910i is the kind of thing that Announces your Entrance. It has a very big, high resolution screen. A QWERTY keyboard. Can open word, pdf, excel documents. It beats other PDAs like O2 XDA and i-Mate JAM because of its comparative sleekness. Everything pleases vanity. But there is a lot that another department does not like. The camera is a rudimentary VGA, fixed focus. And who wants to open word documents while on the move. I don't work when in office. Talk of working on the move. Makes me laugh.

Currently they are at loggerheads. I am an extremely shutter-happy person. I see photographic opportunities all the time. But my camera, like most cameras, is not exactly the thing I would like to always carry in my pocket. The K750i, is an agreeable surrogate to my camera. But the heart speaks loud. With the P910i, I can make my shot at looking like a star. It sets my pulse racing.

The turmoil is on.

The American

The American guy does have a sense of humor. He is a Solutions Architect. In understandable terms, he interacts with the customers interested in the product we build, and works with them to develop methodologies to effectively use the product. In one way, he is a part of the team that sells our product.

He nags me constantly. It is the usual Sales vs R&D thing. He nags me about everything from the product's error messages, to its instability, to its (un)usability, to its "un-sellability", to its name. And he always appends it with a light-hearted "Now C'mon buddy, don't take it seriously". To on-lookers, he says "Just fooling with my guy". At Nokia, I am his guy.

I listen to him. I don't take him seriously. He is fifteen years my senior. And he is definitely entitled to his opinions.

And I quite like him, besides his nagging. He works hard, knows how to laugh at himself, and owns up to his mistakes when he makes them. He makes one that makes us lose three days, and the Nokia guys come and tell us they have a rule around the place. It goes like this: If you make a mistake, that is entirely your doing, needs more than one day to figure out and fix, and you also involve others in fixing it, then you drive down to some fancy pastry shop downtown, and buy pastry for everyone affected by your blunder. The American agrees to do it, and adds, "Okay guys, you eat cake. I'll eat humble pie."

When someone jokes about our eating cake when the project is in very bad shape, he quips, "Isn't that like the Mary Antoinette thing? Why don't they eat cake if they don't have bread?"

Now, thats funny. By any standards.

Dining in Copenhagen

Nokia is to host a dinner for us. Not that there is an occasion that calls for it. The project is still stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no shore in sight. But Wade, the big American guy, is leaving tomorrow, and if there has to be a dinner, it has to be today.

So at 6:30, we head out. We reach Nyhavn, one of the many canals in Copenhagen, and launch into a search for a nice place to eat in. This is difficult in Copehnhagen, mind you, because every one in two establishments is an eating place. The Danish eat a lot, but it does not show on them. They are all fit and athletic.

But coming back to the hunt. Our group is a queer one. Two French, two Danish, one American and an Indian. The Danish speak English like any American, the French manage, and I am somewhere in between. The Danish have something in mind for the restaurant. And in trying to do a random search for a specific place in the restaurant lined streets around Nyhavn, we land up at quite the wrong places. One such is a restaurant called TopDollar, which gives the American a big scare. The Danish laughingly apologize, and continue with the search.

When we finally get there, it is not like anything that I have seen before. The table has been laid out for six, but there are four glasses per person there. If they are all going to be used, then I want to rethink eating here. But I do not have much of a choice. One of the Dans has already taken the liberty of ordering a five course meal with four wines. A girl in black arrives, and tells us about the menu. It is in English, with a smattering of French words for the ingredients used in the food. She puts up a nice show, quite intimidating for me. I tell her, quite apologizingly that I am a vegetarian, but I can have some chicken. She asks if I can have duck, and does so in a manner that I can not refuse. I don't. My fate is sealed. I am to eat duck today. Quite against my will. I know I would not like it. I am doing no better today than the dead duck I would soon be eating.

We drink four wines, the last one a dessert wine. The dessert wines have low alcoholic content, and are sweetened. But the ones before that, the REAL ones, are heavy duty stuff. The first two are white. Everyone except me joins in a discussion on wines. There is quite a consensus that the first one "just disappears from over the tongue", while the second one has a "buttery taste". To me, they all taste quite the same. The red one is heavier than the white ones, but that is all I can say. I do not even get close to dreaming up quaint descriptions like "disappearing from over the tongue" for wines.

The American is a nice guy. But he is a snob. He says his annual wine budget is forty to forty-five thousand American Dollars. He might have said it under the effect of alcohol, but that is enough to give me a complex, as that is twice what I manage to earn in India. He drinks up the salary of two engineers like me. That is a humiliating thought. I hate the American. I swear I do.

The dishes are all queer. But there is one commonality that I do not miss. They all come in plates much bigger than they need to come in. It makes them look very less and inadequate. And actually, they are much lesser than one would like to eat. Not more than three or four spoonfuls. But I have the idea that everyone is quite enjoying it. With five westerners, I do not have the option of not enjoying it. Even if it is bland tasting, half cooked rice (Risotto) with some very absurd tasting sea-food (mussels). Three glasses of wine only help the purpose. I would, now, have found it easy to enjoy just about anything. After three glasses of wine, life is, in general, good.

It ends with a dessert. Finally, something I can make sense of. It all tastes sweet. Finally, something that tastes like it is supposed to. Everyone seems to have enjoyed the dinner. The American thanks the Danish guys profusely. Everyone is happy, we head home. On the way back, one of the French guys, Rochdi, walks with me. We start talking, and I ask him if this really was typical French food. He says, yes, but it was as weird for him as it was for me. It is not everyday that one eats like this, not even in France. And not every restaurant there serves food like this.

So it is not just me, a disadvantaged third-worlder that sees it like that. The French agrees! I get some of my pride back. Maybe, in Copenhagen, I am not ALWAYS off the mark.