Back to the Brick

After wasting so many words on yesterday's post, the Tundra went back to the AT&T store this afternoon. Sigh! I'm gravely disappointed in the unit and in Motorola. So much for my brand loyalty getting me somewhere good.

On Friday evening the Tundra rebooted itself spontaneously once. I thought it was a fluke and kept on going, putting in hours of work with personalizing it and generally taking ownership. I like things just so and until I had everything the way I wanted it, there'd be no rest. Yesterday morning even as I was expecting a call I caught the screen going white out of the corner of my eye and saw that it was doing it again. I hunted online to see if there were any known issues and while the inexplicable rebooting wasn't listed, there was a big issue with Tundras hanging during the shut down sequence and freezing with GOODBYE on the screen. I hoped against all odds that the reboots were going to go away. They didn't, and this morning after it happened again, I figured I'd reboot the phone manually myself. You guessed it. It hung at GOODBYE and that was all it took to realize that it was time for me to say goodbye to it too. Subsequent online research revealed that one guy was on his fourth Tundra and it was buggy too. I'm sure I made the right move in returning it.

Nothing's ever easy, of course. My old V365 is apparently out of production and the local store couldn't get one if it wanted to. The AT&T website says it's available for me to upgrade (horizontally) to it, but they're "Temporarily out of stock," and I'm guessing that the condition isn't temporary. Worst of all, the manager at the store admitted to me that there isn't a phone that they stock that can boast a decent talk time between recharges. It seems that my girls and their generation have redefined the cell phone and made it into something that's good for texting, for playing music and games, but not for talking, and so the manufacturers have catered to them in creating the current line of cell phones that aren't really designed to be used as telephones, i.e, for talking much.

THE BRICK

And so I'm back to using "The Brick" as it was affectionately called online by others who loved it too. I have my daughter's old V365 that she upgraded from some months ago. It might be ancient by today's standards, but it's like the old brown shoe. It's a comfortable fit. I had the presence of mind when she bequeathed it to me as a backup to copy all of my contacts, ringtones, and pictures over, and I charged it every week. It was good to go as soon as I decided that the Tundra was going back.

If you're going to recommend a phone, I want something with a long talk time between charges (5+ hours), a 2.5 mm headset jack, and a mini USB charge port, and I don't want to buy it on Ebay from some guy in the UK named Shanuib.