A mobile phone that costs 60k-plus should be able to kiss you goodnight. Hell, a phone that costs that much should be able to tell you if your fly is open. Samsung Galaxy S III, unfortunately, is not that phone.
A confession: I’m a Nokia sycophant. I have used Nokias all my life. My first Nokia was a 51-something. It was on offer, complete with 250 bob airtime. The ugliest phone I ever used. But 2001 were virgin years of mobile telephony, and it really didn’t matter what phone you had, it was just enough to have a mobile phone. Carrying that phone around felt like carrying an obese baby. And if by some rotten chance it fell on your feet, it would break all the phalanges on it. I’m serious, every last bone. It also had antennae, which, used properly, could maim or even paralyse a grown-ass man, if you thrust it in the right body part. Like the eye, or navel.
Which is ironical because when thugs finally relived me of it – the only time I have had a gun thrust in my face – the antennae didn’t mean squat. But undeterred by such villainy, I continued purchasing Nokias. I bought them because there is a certain reassurance when you buy a Nokia; that it won’t throw you under the bus. Unless, of course, your child pees on it. Or microwaves it.
So you can imagine my gleeful confusion when after over a decade of using Nokias, I got the Samsung Galaxy S III in my possession. Which brings me to another confession: I’m no Savvy Kenya. I’m not a techie. I have no technical authority to review a gadget, any gadget. But the only reason I’m reviewing this is because I’m a consumer, and also because for the first time a phone has stirred me enough to write about it.
Let’s jump right into it, shall we?
You can’t talk about a phone like Samsung Galaxy SIII without talking about Nairobi’s bourgeoisie sub-culture because then you’d be missing the river by a boat. Now, it’s no news that Nairobi is full of pretence, which, curiously, makes it habitable. It’s this pretence that turn the cogs of it’s economy; consumers driven by trivialities that are pegged on products that increase our social net worth in the grand scale of things. Stay with me, I’m onto something here.
And for this reason you will hear some cat say, “Ai boss, I don’t need me a fancy phone. I need a simple phone that can send an sms and receive calls, kwani?” Now this is a guy who has a phone he (and the world) can’t stand. I call this class indignation, a kind of social inertia. It’s the same thing you will hear from a Vitz driver who will say, “ Isn’t the most important thing is to get from point A to point B?” Bollocks. When you sit at the steering wheel of a Range Rover Sport you will understand it’s never really about getting from point A to point B.
Put the Samsung Galaxy SIII in this clown’s hands and ask him if he still feels the same way. Ask him if he still needs a phone that only sends sms and receives calls and watch him fiddle with words.
The Galaxy SIII looks suave; it’s as trim as an athlete. It’s a phone that lives on chicken salad and smoothies. Which explains its weight -133grams. Sexy as hell. It’s a bit large though, which means any chic that all those size six chicks that flock to Galileos might have a bit of a problem holding it with their small hands.
I’m shady, I’ve never used a touch-screen phone before, so I was a bit bewildered by its touch sensitive large, 4.8-inch, 720p resolution display. This meant that it slowed my sms composition time at the beginning. So, for instance when I tried writing, “Chief are you ever going to pay me my money or should I call your mother?” it came out as “ Cheif, are you ecer gojn to pay me mu money, ot should I xall your nothet?” Which sort if trivialized the menace in my sms. Suffice it to say, he told be that it was okay to call his mother.
Everybody now has an android phone, but not everybody has a higher screen resolution, a clearer colour production, which turns your phone into a movie. The only problem with this is that I can’t take this phone to bed for those nights that insomnia comes knocking. The missus hates when I get on phone at 2am because that light wakes her up (you can always reduce the light intensity, but what good is that?). So yes, Samsung Galaxy S3 might start a fight at 2am. A fight you will lose.
I hated the chord though. It’s slightly shorter than my daughter’s arm. This means I can’t be seated on the sofa browsing and charge my phone at the same time. Also, sometimes you need a longer cord just in case you need to use it to tie someone’s hands together (I really don’t want to get into this now).
Inherently, most people in Nairobi nurse a silent quest to be cool, or to be considered cool. Especially the ones who act like they wouldn’t be less bothered. We go to clubs that we consider cool. We buy high heels that make us look hip, (something some men reading this blog would relate to). We move into neighbourhoods that make us feel cool. That’s why everybody flocked to Kileleshwa and that’s why one day they will wake up to a sobering reality that Kile was never cool.
Now, I’m not a cool chap like those blokes who go for Subaru clinics, those guys who refer to their cars in ways that would make you imagine their cars experience menses every month. I’m not that guy. But I hanker for coolness. And I recently realised that the Samsung SIII continues to catapult me to the proximity of coolness every time I met someone who went, “Fugg! Is that the SII!?”? I have many instances, but I will share two.
The missus has this girls-kyama. Now, sometimes these ladies bring all their men to meet for a meat/drink something so that they can get to know each other better. It’s non-negotiable, these shindigs; you free your calendar and you attend and meet these other men who you drink with and be a good sport. And if at some point you need to go to the loo you raise your hand and ask for permission.
Now, one of her pal’s is one of those chaps who always look like he’s doing better than you are; one time he’s driving a shinde, the other he’s rocking those swanky blazers that cost a kidney. I like to watch him closely because in my head, he sells drugs. I mean, ask him what he does and he will say “biashara” or “this and that”. Si that’s drugs?
Anyway, I recently ran into him in Karen, just outside Nakumat. I was locking my car, he was walking towards his. I had the Samsung in my hand. He saw it. His eyes lit up, but since he’s a guy who doesn’t want to show that kind of excitement he muttered, “ The SIII, Biko, you already have it when it’s not even three days old, eh?” But he didn’t ask to see it, and that said more than if he had asked to see it. Think about it.
Second instance. Along Westlands Road is a car garage cum carwash- right opposite Purshottam Place. My boy, Gordie, manages it. By the way, try it out, take your car there for a wash or service, they do a kick-ass job. Tell Gordie Bikozulu referred you; he will treat you like a queen/king. He’s a decent guy, Gordie. In the garage is this small kibanda place where Gordie and I normally have fish on most lunch times. Now Gordie is a proud chap who likes to imagine he’s up to speed with trends and whatnot. The first time I rocked up there with the phone he saw it but he didn’t say anything. I watched him look at it curiously; I watched him struggle with his pride that – miraculously – he triumphed over. The second time, he succumbed and took it from me and inspected it closely, like you would a rare gem. After a while he asked me, “ Are you now dating rich old women?”
So yes, people will notice. The Samsung SIII is a phone that refuses to stand in a corner nursing its drink. It’s not cut for obscurity. Not when it has features like S-voice for voice recognition, Smart Call that dials a contacts number by you simply bringing the phone to your ear, Social Tug that uses facial recognition to match faces in photographs with the profile photos in your contacts. Then there is the camera that sports a 1.9MP sensor and can capture 720p video at the same time as taking still pictures. My daughter is constantly Youtubing Dora The Explorer on it.
Last week I was in shags and I took a picture of my grandma using Instagram. My grandma isn’t one to be impressed by technology and so when I showed her the picture, she mumbled something about her being so old. So what I did was, I edited the picture; increased the light and changed it into black and white and then showed her again. She was thrilled! Laughing she grabbed the phone and said, “Apenji Abiki [my shags name] ma en sime koso TV?” (Is this a phone or a television?”) So what the Samsung Galaxy SIII did was it reawakened my grandma’s long dead sense of vanity, and – I’m very certain – increased her self-esteem.
I hate its battery life though; I’m always charging it. I have dropped it twice. First time was a low fall, from the TV stand onto the parquet floor. She took it on the chin like a big girl. The second fall was higher. I was getting into the car and as I put it in my breast pocket, I missed it and it fell on the cold hard concrete. The feeling you get when you drop a phone like this is similar to going to visit a new mother in hospital and almost dropping her newborn. It scares you. It didn’t break though, it survived the fall.
But once I got in the car, I took a moment to have a chat with her. “Baby,” I told her, “Don’t ever scare me like that again!” Oh, and another plus, I can interview all my interviews from it.
What Samsung Galaxy S3 does, without realizing, is that it has decanted a society of mobile users. It’s separated the folk who use mobile phones as a necessity and the people who use mobile handsets as an extension of who they are. It’s done what restaurants, bars, schools have done all these time; define a sub-class.
And so the Samsung Galaxy SIII has become revelatory in many ways than one. It has shifted expectancy and what this means is that its a phone that has not only managed to embrace your needs; it’s a phone that also demands more of you even when it continues to think for you.
There is a feature it has called Smart Stay which uses front-facing camera to periodically check if your eyes are looking at it and if not, it turns the screen off to save power. This means, you could be in bed, reading online but then you doze off, the phone will go on sleep mode as well.
So there, the Samsung Galaxy SIII might not kiss you goodnight, but it will wait for you to doze off before snoozing off itself. Makes you wonder if you really need a dog.