How long until I kill my Nokia N95?

If I hadn't spent so much money on such a small pile of crap, I'd have fed it to a dog by now.

Consider this.

I charged it completely on Thursday night. It even beeped at me to let me know that the battery was full.

I was flat by 9am Friday, even though I had not touched it to do a single thing. It failed to even last 12 hours on a brand new battery.

Then it decided to start locking up everytime I tried to use the "maps" function. The only way to recover was to remove the battery and reboot the bloody thing.

And speaking of reboot time, it takes at least 5 minutes to boot. I am going to time it one of these days, just to find out how long it takes. I can make an omelette for breakfast in less time than it takes it to boot (that I do know).

I seem to have solved the "maps" problem. I went into the GPS application and told it to find out where I was standing. After 5 minutes of searching the heavens (and flattening the battery), it managed to find out where I was. Since then, the mapping function has performed as it should - but it shouldn't have needed that initial "boot" to get it to work.

As for changing between functions...........sigh.

When I was at Uni, I did a stats course. We had to do all sorts of number crunching, either on a PDP-11 mainframe, or on the ultramodern IBM XT PC's in the computer lab. Or they might have been the AT model. Whatever. They had two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives - you booted DOS from one disk, then inserted a second disk that ran the application that you wanted - say Lotus 123 (Excel did not exist at that time). After putting a spreadsheet together, you'd save the data to a floppy, then take out the 123 floppy and put in another floppy in order to run SPSS (a stats package).

Now, consider how long it takes to close a program, remove a floppy, put that floppy back in it sleeve, take another floppy out of its sleeve, insert into floppy drive, boot program etc etc.

The Nokia takes even longer to flip between applications. No, let me rephrase that - to crawl between applications. Flip has too many connotations about speed. I imagine that there is a little troll inside the phone, sitting there in a cubicle waiting to swap floppy disks over every time I want to use the camera or the music player........and they are the type of troll that doesn't get out of bed unless they are being paid doubletime.

I don't know what Nokia were thinking of when they designed this phone.... but whatever it was, they couldn't have been thinking about very much.