I hate my phone.
I didn’t always hate my phone, I actually quite liked its predecessor, a Motorola Moto X Play. It was partially made of rubber so it was durable – it was dropped from great heights many times without a problem. It was somewhat bulky, but it worked well and I was happy with it. And then immediately after the contract ended it broke, as though it was on a timer. It worked great and suddenly didn’t work very well at all.
The result was that I had to go to the nearest phone place and get a new phone. This one, purchased under a bit of duress as a result, was from a different brand – it’s an LG Q6 – and had a different standard of quality. Instead of working great until I needed to replace it, the phone has spent pretty much the entire period of my ownership working well enough to still function while working just poorly enough to make me constantly want to replace it.
Of course, it was the entry-level phone. I went with a cheap one because I’m cheap, and this seemed fine. And the overriding design philosophy seems to be a punishment for not spending the extra cash to get the more expensive model.
Everything is just slow enough, just broken enough, just subtly bad enough to be annoying, but not so bad in any measure that the phone doesn’t function.
It feels like a deliberate attempt to be slightly worse than is ideal. It is absolutely infuriating.
The problem with this is that come January, because I can barely tolerate this phone as is, I’ll be getting a new and different phone. The problem with that is, because of the experience with this terrible phone, I have a different problem – it is becoming very difficult to get myself to buy another cheap phone.
This is a problem partially due to budget - I do not want to pay for an expensive phone – and partially due to being reasonable – I don’t particularly need an expensive phone. If I look at what I actually need, I am not a particularly intense mobile user. In theory, I only need something on the bottom end of the market. I’m not playing games on it - I don’t like a touch screen for games - I’m not taking many photos with it - the consequence of collecting cameras is that if I’m doing much beyond a snapshot I’m using those – and honestly all I really need are basic features and something that can record sound. I have that. If it didn’t feel almost intentionally bad it would fit my needs fine.
But it is bad, and that is pushing me towards phones that I don’t need or, if I’m honest, particularly want.
