A friend of mine is a Realtor, and recently acquired a new smartphone to try and stay on top of her ever-increasing mountain of work (cue sarcastic snort here). On a whim, I dredged out my new phone to compare against her -- and mine was nothing, really, compared to hers; it was just one of the free Samsung models offered through my cell company (T-Mobile). But it worked, and for what I needed it for, it worked well: it has a hands-free mode that's better than the actual speakerphone on my desk (!), and it's far lighter if a bit bigger than the model it replaced.
Her phone sported everything you could think of -- full QWERTY keyboard, digital dual-band support, you name it. Well, almost everything. Turns out that a week after she'd bought the thing (out of her own pocket, too), she'd dropped it in the bathtub and ruined the keyboard. The last time I dropped a phone in water (my earlier Samsung, also a freebie), I disconnected everything, let it dry out for 72 hours, and fired it up. It worked perfectly.
Now I remember why, whenever I see someone else's bit of $400 digital bling, I get jealous and then immediately check myself. It's not really jealousy. It's me remembering that I'm one of the clumsiest, most unintentionally butter-fingered fools on God's green earth, and that if I trusted myself to anything that expensive in my hands for more than a month I'd end up regretting it. And so far, I've been right.
(...which explains why the notebook I'm typing this on has a 2-year damage-protection warranty...)
I love technology. I just know that any technology that I need to exercise undue caution while carrying around with me is probably a bad match for me. To this day I still don't know how I managed to demolish my old notebook's display doing nothing more than putting it in a bag and walking up three flights of stairs without bumping into anything or getting broadsided. (I blame elves.)
I also know and am grateful for the fact that on the whole things have gotten that much more rugged in the last couple of years. The only reason I didn't shell out for one of the Toughbook notebooks was the killer pricetag -- otherwise, hey, a notebook that can survive everything from a rainstorm to squirting out of my fingers and flying across the room like someone smeared it with cooking oil for a prank? Don't laugh; I've done that -- fortunately the notebook landed on my bed with a clearance of only a few inches, and I did not end up shelling out for a horrific repair job.
But on the whole, when I shop for personal electronics, I'm guided by one criterion more than anything else: How likely am I to mess this up? If I buy a flip phone, is the hinge strong enough to survive me stupidly sitting down on it when I leave it open on my chair (something I've done not once but TWICE)? And so on.
If I spend nothing on a phone save the cost of my contract and use it for four years, that's a better bargain to me than spending even $75 (or $150, or $200) and worrying that I've gotten stuck with something that will simply be unable to survive six months banging around in my particular pocket ... or falling into my particular bathtub.
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