My Cell Phone?? Oh, you mean my Brick Attack player!
Written: Dec 16 '01
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Pros: lightweight & small, seems relatively sturdy, good sound, lots of features
Cons: not very cool-looking
The Bottom Line: A good solid little phone with good sound quality. But someone needs to improve Brick Attack!
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| cathyb53's Full Review: Kyocera QCP 2035a Cell Phone |
I didn't want a cell phone. I think they're aggravating and dumb, and the last thing in the world I want or need to is be any more readily-accessible than I already am. The thought of being hounded by my phone when I'm out in my garden, or away from my home, or out walking along the street, is extremely unpalatable to me. After all, I have a good answering machine, e-mail, a very excellent mailman, and a husband that's so wired-in that I sometimes think I'm receiving e-mail in my back fillings if I stand too close to him. (Seriously, the man can hardly keep his pants up with all the electronic gear he totes around!) I hate with a passion the entire notion of being followed around by my telephone and its insistent demands - I don't even answer the darn thing at home unless there's someone I'm hoping to hear from. Not to even mention all those obnoxious yuppies walking around (and even worse - driving around) attached to their phones: how rude! how self-important! how annoying!
So a cell phone was clearly nothing I was in the market for. Besides the "on general principles" objections, the things were clearly aggravational; they sound bad, they cost money, they're another piece of stuff to lug around, the various "calling plans" are confusing at best, they look like they'd break the first time they slid out of your pocket, they're easy to lose, and who needs yet another bill coming in?
And then came two events, in close succession: Sept. 11, and an emergency trip to Philadelphia. On Sept. 11, I was booked on an early-morning flight home to New York from San Francisco, along with my 70-year-old (and similarly technologically-challenged) parents. When the planes crashed and the airports closed down, we were stranded on the far side of the continent from our homes, glad that the three of us were together (we had just celebrated their 50th anniversary, with my California siblings) but distressed at being across the continent from my husband and children. Well, you've all seen the news reports from those days, and you can imagine the scene: stranded (although fortunately with our luggage and in a hotel room, rather than in an airport with all our clean underpants already checked through), hours-long lines, massive confusion as to when/if/where/how we'd be able to get home, phone lines jammed, pay phones crowded...Well, it all worked out eventually, after a lot of sweating and uncertainty and "OK, you wait in line while I go try to find a phone to call ___", and we made it home safely.
Less than two weeks later, I got a phone call from my newly-launched daughter in Philly: she'd fallen at work, thought she'd broken her arm and maybe her coccyx, been turned away from the Emergency Room at the nearest hospital, no car, no friends, no doctor, no food in the house...clearly a case for Mom to come help out despite Daughter's protests. Fine, no problem, glad to do it - only one problem: her only phone is a cell phone, the kind young people with no credit ratings get where you pay in advance for "minutes", and of course her minutes ran out as she was making her SOS call, and she had no way to get more. (And we think that the job of parenting ends when the kids leave home? No, it just gets less convenient and more expensive.) So, after a suitable period of worrying with no way to reach her, I loaded up my little blue Beetle with groceries and headed down to see how I could help. At which point, I too was stuck with no functioning phone - until I figured out where & how to buy more minutes, there was no way to call doctors, stay in contact with my husband (who was checking out various healthcare facilities on-line), arrange the things that needed to be arranged.
OK. I got home after a few days, to find that my dear husband had already bought me a cell phone, so that the poor sweet man wouldn't have to put up with this sort of incommunicado situation we'd been in twice within the month. He had worried about me a lot when we were separated, especially given the climate of fear and uncertainty that was prevalent in those first couple of post-attack weeks. I had fretted about not being able to accomplish the many organizational tasks that needed to be done by phone during both of these episodes. So I was willing to accept that the dreaded cell phone was about to become a part of my life.
So the phone he chose was the Kyocera QCP 2035a. He knows everything that could possibly need to be known about such things, so I'm sure he chose well. (I, on the other hand, have less than zero interest in electronic gadgets.) This is a man who does computer-connection for a living, and the guy could probably orchestrate and execute the command system for a nuclear attack from his own cell phone on the way from the grocery store to the gas station; certainly he is able to hook his own cell phone into his computers & those of the university where he works and somehow have access to them via his little phone. I don't need all that - I just need to be able to make and receive phone calls.
The Kyocera QCP 2035a has a lot of "features": I don't know what most of them are for. I don't have mine rigged to talk to my computer, but it has the capability to do so somehow. It takes messages (although I discovered on a recent trip to DC that I don't actually know how to retrieve my messages). It stores all the phone numbers of my kids and family and anybody else I put in, and it dials them up all by itself. It has a "tip calculator" - equally useful for figuring out what a sale item will cost on X% markdown, and a variety of "settings", which I don't know what any of them mean and therefore I don't mess with. There's a calculator in there, and a clock with alarms, and all kinds of stuff.
The phone sounds pretty good from both the sending & receiving ends, especially compared to some other cell phones I've talked on. (Except sometimes the phone just cuts off for no reason I can figure out - I don't know if that's a function of the phone itself, or of the "service", or if that's just normal with cell phones, or what. Seems like a drawback to me.) Its little antenna seems like a pretty flimsy thing, but my DH assures me it's fine. Clearly, I'm not really what you'd call "intimate" with this cell phone yet, but so far it doesn't bother me too much. And I don't really feel qualified to say much about it.
Except for one thing: Brick Attack. This is a little game that comes with the phone. You find it at the end of the "Tools" menu. I have become addicted to Brick Attack, which is a problem because, as a game, it has some serious flaws. Brick Attack is a very simple ping-pongy kind of thing - there's a paddle (a bar that you move back & forth across the bottom of the tiny screen), and a ball (a dot that roams around at varying speeds, pretty much at will, which you try to hit with the paddle), and the "bricks" (various configurations of small boxes that turn black when you hit them with the "ball" once and disappear when you've hit them twice. The goal is to knock out all the little bricks, and you accumulate points - the longer you can keep the ball in play, the more points you get. Eventually you run out of turns, and that's that.
Now, I'm here to tell you that Brick Attack is a dumb game. Given that, and given that I'm hooked on it, I can tell you that this is a game in need of some serious improvement. It's slow, except for random times when it suddenly goes crazy, and the "ball" moves most of the time in very predictable and easily out-maneuvered pathways. So it's not very challenging - which it ought to be, if it has to exist at all. And there's no progression of skill levels from game to game; while within each game it gets more difficult the longer you play, each time you start a new game you have to work your way up to the challenging part from the very beginning. Boring. Since I got this phone, I've spent a lot of time playing Brick Attack - in airports, waiting in lines, even sometimes at home for no good reason - and this is the aspect of this phone I'm most familiar with.
Have I softened my stance on cell phones since becoming an owner of one? Well, no, not really; they have their uses, and when you need one you need one, and under those circumstances it ought to be a functional and sturdy piece of equipment. So fix up the Brick Attack, and I'm sure this would be a perfect phone - if it weren't, I'm sure my DH wouldn't have chosen it for me.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): gift
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Epinions.com ID:
cathyb53
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Cathy B.
Location: beautiful Ithaca NY
Reviews written: 133
Trusted by: 40 members
About Me:
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now"...Bob Dylan
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