Mini-me

I lost my 02 XDA mini a few weeks back, 11 months after I purchased it.

Before the mini, I owned 2 other phones, the Nokia 5110 and 5210. The 5110, in particular, is not only virtually indestructible, it also guarantees that should you, by any chance, forget it in a restaurant or any other establishment, the staff will RUN after you just to return it. I once left a 5110 in a cab in singapore. After confirming that I was indeed the owner of the phone, the passenger who rode the cab after I got off, promptly returned it to me the next day. My mom left a 5110 in a restaurant in Ayala Center, Cebu, and the waiter chased us all over the mall just to return it.

No such luck on my mini. The waiters of the restaurant in Powerplant swore to high heavens that I didn't leave it there, even if I used the mini to text a friend 10 minutes before we left. The staff at 2/f comfort room, where we went after dinner at the resto, also saw nothing. When my friend tried to call my phone, I, apparently, could no longer be reached.

That's when it hit me. I didn't know anyone's phone number except my office, our landline in the province and 8-MCDO for delivery. Thank goodness for the dude who thought of "sync-ing" the data in pdas with Microsoft Outlook, and those who put the address book feature in yahoo, gmail and other free email.

Now, I'm temporarily using my dad's Motorola E398. Which is pretty good, except for a few things: (a) the space bar is the left button of the last row, instead of the middle (like Nokia's), (b) you have to press the <1> button four times if you want to put a comma in your text message (unlike the Nokia's two times), (c) you can't put insert a smiley like this =) or :-) because it takes too long to find those symbols and by the time you do, you're too pissed to put a smiley on your message. More importantly, it can store maybe 50 messages. To put things in perspective, I had about 800 messages in my Inbox and 500 messages in the Sent Items folder of my mini. Now, I get daily warnings that my phone's memory is low because I have 30 messages on my inbox!

I store all my appointments in an appointment book I got as a giveaway last Christmas. It's the size of a grade 1 notebook, though, hence, a bit bulky. I miss the convenience of taking one look at my calendar in the mini (month view) and being able to say, up front, whether I am free or not on that day. Instead, I have to manually leaf through the pages of my appointment book to check.

I think I've remained fairly sane, despite the loss. I'm trying to muster enough EQ to wait for a good time to buy a replacement, instead of running to the nearest shop. I want either the PalmOne Treo 650, the PalmOne 700w or the 02 Atom to replace my mini, all of which won't sync with my computer because they require Win XP (my computer is using Win ME at the moment, due to hardware constraints). So, now, on top of everything else, I have to upgrade my computer. But that's another story.