You hear a lot of talk about different phone operating systems and think, “who cares, a phone is a phone. all i want to do is text and call”
For a while that’s true, then you develop a nasty case of touch envy and you keep going home to your little corner, sit on the floor hugging your knees close to your chest and mutter, “a phone is a phone”.
As you rock yourself back and forth, you think, you’re cured, then you go back to the office and as luck would have it, you are one of those gadget fiends, so quite naturally, you will run to the nearest gadget weblog you can find and, wouldn’t you know it, the battle of the phone OSes is still raging.
But what’s this, it’s not enough to just think OSes, not as long as Steve Jobs is around, you absolutely have to get a touchscreen, mbu who uses buttons anymore? ‘The bastard’ you think to yourself as you start to bring your knees closer then suddenly remember you are at work and the last time you got away with the excuse that you were trying to choke an intestine may have been just that, THE LAST TIME.
Then you catch word that there’s a new phone in town, and what’s this? You won’t have to sell your workmate’s car tyres to pay for the damn thing.
So as you sit there,  a series of changes start to take place. You suddenly realise you can become part of the touch screen elite. The chosen few. You can finally be one of those people that bellows, “AH CRAP, FINGERPRINTS, why can’t people just be born without them” like you’re noticing them for the first time.
You see the ad in the paper, MTN introduces… you ignore the rest because, let’s face it, all you are thinking about is the cost and the fact that you can touch, touch and touch some more.
That chic at the bar that asked you to take your hands away from her like she was worried she’d catch some strain of the Brazilian Flu is going to see now. You’ll show her.
That guy at the office that thinks his phone can clear the Ntinda traffic, yeah, he’ll get what’s coming to him.
In an ideal situation you’d be fumbling with the box, eager to yank it out. But in an ideal situation, if you fumbled and dropped the phone, you’d be able to replace the buttons with pieces of wood, a pebble or a piece of rubber from your flip flops.
Here, you slide the box ever so gently, like the meaning of life lays in there. Then again, loser that you may be, it probably does.
Then you see it, lying snugly in its little cradle, you pull it out gingerly, no point in rushing this, it’s not high school, you’re not hiding at the back of the library with that girl from that school. With any luck this is going to last a little longer than that encounter…
…and reminiscent of that encounter, you pull it out…
You stare at it lovingly, the way John Bobbit probably did when the doctor’s handed him his equipment and said, “we can fix this”.
You turn it over see the word Google stretching from top to bottom like an overzealous tattoo. No matter. It also doesn’t matter that it’s got a yellow back. Probably an MTN ego thing.  What matters to you at this point is that you have a touchscreen phone that sits snuggly in the palm of your hand without inviting glares and stares and proclamations that it’s huge… or your snarky retort that everything you hold in that hand is HUGE.
Playtime is over, you reach for the button at the top and wake it up. It stirs, then vibrates then you remember you should have charged the damn thing, but that can wait, let’s see what this baby can do…