Punk Rock Cell Phone

My Treo 300 cell/pda broke the other day. Not in any digital or electronic way, its a pure mechanical failure. Phone and pda work great still, but the flip mechanism for opening the device is straight busted. Flip open the phone and the top half is left dangling. Worst part about it is anyone with a couple weeks of high school physics could have predicted this issue, the failure is engineered right into the device. Every time you open the phone, a strong metal spring pushes the soft plastic flip top open. Hard metal pushing on soft plastic, its going to break, guaranteed. And I've only had this particular Treo 300 for 7 months.

Planned obsolescence sucks no matter how you cut it, but I've come to expect I'll be getting a new phone every 12-18 months or so. 7 seems a short for an obvious design flaw. Especially since the replacement model isn't even due out for another few months.

Anyway despite this problem I still think the Treo's are the best devices on the market. The killer app in a palm for me is email, so it needs to be a phone combo. And it needs a keyboard. The Treo is the best of that small bunch.

Anyway for reasons I'm not going to go into here, I'm keeping my current Treo till the new model comes out, rather then having insurance replace it. So that means I'm going full cyberpunk on it. A pda phone held together with wire, velcro and electrical tape. Its the new style, you hear me? All those shiny new devices need to get out like Tom Cruise, its all about the hacked up tech pappi.