A few days ago, my phone stopped working on a whim.
The last time that happened to me, I rushed to the friendly neighbourhood
phone- and utilities shop and bought the cheapest phone they had, called the
Samsung Guru, which had a photo of Aamir Khan on the box and cost me a grand total
of Rs. 990. This time, I was travelling so it was far worse. Turns out my phone
battery, barely over a year old, had crashed. So I’ve had to buy a new battery
for a shocking 1300 bucks, and it’s not even a Duracell.
But this is not a rant about inflation nor the
increasing dependence on expensive technology because it’s something I accept
as a part of modern life. It’s useful and I love it. And, this isn’t even about
how far behind cell phone battery technology is lagging when placed against
cell phone technology. You have twenty thousand things on your phone, but the
battery will only last you like a handful of hours. No.
Instead, this time I’m off on SIM cards. I managed
to acquire a spare phone, but my SIM card, which has been chopped to half its
size, wouldn’t work on that phone. I miss those simpler days when all SIM cards
were the same size. Back then, if your phone stopped working, you could very
easily pick up an old phone lying around and slot the SIM into the replacement
phone. Most of your contacts also stayed intact, since they were saved on the
card itself. Today, in an era of iPhone 6 and Samsung S7 and HTC 8+, you have
like your full-sized SIM, a mini-SIM, a micro SIM, a nano SIM. They all serve exactly the same purpose, but different
phones developed by different companies require a different-sized SIM for it to
work. To that, I only have one question: Why?
Isn’t technology supposed to make everything easier
to use? Is it like an ego battle between techies that makes them develop their
own unique specifications for a SIM card? They’re already doing it with
chargers and I’ve learnt to accept that – in my home itself, my iPod charger
doesn’t work on the iPad, so if one of them breaks or gets lost, that’s a heavy
investment. I get that – capitalism is great and evil and corporations want to maximize
profits this way. But readjusting the size of the SIM card and cutting it to
fit the design of the phone is a free process. What is the end game here?
I have a Samsung today; what if I buy an iPhone
tomorrow? Then I’ll have to go to a bloody Vodafone outlet, deal with their
call centre specialists in person, show them all kinds of identification to
prove that I am, in fact, me, and get a new SIM card. If a week later that
phone packs up on me and I have to get it fixed and use the older Samsung for a
few days, then I have to repeat the entire process, and once it gets fixed I’ll
have to repeat the whole thing all over again.
Do phone manufacturers have some kind of a tie-up
with network and service providers? Did Vodafone make a call on their crackling
network and say: “Hey Apple Tim, we have to justify the salary of all these
fucking idiots we’ve hired to work at our service centres so why don’t you send
a few people our way and we’ll give you a free caller tune for Rs. 35 a month?”
Before I’m shot down, I do realize that you have
these cool little SIM card adapter-type things that you can buy at any shop
that sells recharge coupons and phone covers and chargers and stuff, that too
for like anywhere between 30 and 50 bucks which, compared to multiple trips to
a Vodafone service centre, is pretty much the greatest deal imaginable, even if
they often don’t work. (They’re a small attachment to your SIM, making it compatible
with devices that support a different-sized SIM.)
Basically, you get a regular-sized SIM card, then
you get it sliced in half, then you buy an adapter to make your SIM card bigger
again. I don’t get it?
