Samsung Galaxy S3 was born into privilege. She was born into a world already prepared to accept her. It helped, of course, that she was different and beautiful. That she did things that other phones didn’t do. Couldn’t do.
Samsung was trolling into new technology waters and turning gadgets into objects that we did more than use, but get into a union with. The S3 wooed and befriended us. Became our best mate, an in turn tried to topple the dog’s century-old reign as man’s best friend. Now you have another best friend and one that you don’t have to pick up its poop. She was as obedient as the dog and with the biggest brain any phone has ever had, a brain that recognises your face, and your voice and your friend’s faces, a phone that would keep watching you until you fell sleep. Then it turned in herself. Designed for humans but inspired by nature.
I’m going somewhere with this, just hang on.
And it’s in this favoured era that the Samsung Galaxy S3 was midwifed. A world of glitz and functionality. And she was both adored and ululated; from the stuffy smorgasbord of Indian streets to the Fevalas of Brazil; from the cold metallic shores of Dakar Senegal to Cape Town’s Long Street. Samsung S3 wasn’t going to do any wrong before our eyes and when it did, we excused her because sometimes we excuse a beautiful woman when she does dumb things. But mostly we excused the S3 because she validated us.
And you will never find a people that need more validation than Nairobians. We are hungry to fit. We are starved of that shit. We adopt things, often-trivial things, in the hope that it will make us belong and be defined. We gloat about our 700k Japanese automobile acquisitions in the media. And when tweet breathlessly when we wait to board a plane. To Kisumu, for chrissake. Not Luanda. Kisumu. And we wake up and go to Twitter before we have brushed our teeth because in Tweeter we can start afresh and be who we can’t be in the flesh. We are Nairobians.
And so the Samsung S3 easily found home in us.
Unfortunately, beauty has a window. Not a large window like the Lamu window but a small window, like a manyatta window. And time is beauty’s Achilles’ heels. Everything fades when touched with the bony hands of time. Beauty especially. Emma Too isn’t the woman she was in the 90’s. And to be fair, neither is George Michael. In fact, the only woman in the world whose truant beauty continues to defy time is Toni Braxton. Have you seen Toni in a bob-cut? Doesn’t she inspire nothing short of a minute’s silence?
And so the Samsung’s S3’s beauty had to transform, it had to succumb to time. And it did. The novelty wore off. More beauties came in offering more than just a lullaby. The room got crowded. After all the attention and razzmatazz that met its entrance in the room, the Samsung Galaxy S3 was confronted with the horrifying reality that the attention had shifted to other things and was faced with questions: What could it do? Have Pulse magazine take it’s picture at a shindig? Release one wobbly single with Sauti Sol? Get on Big Brother and last slightly longer than…
The Samsung Galaxy got smart. It stood before a mirror one day and said, “I’m going to be a better person for myself first and then to the world.” Which, come to think about it, is something everybody who frequents Brew Bistro should tell themselves.
So she hit the gym. Avoided carbohydrates before 7pm. Joined a yoga class. Drank water instead of soda. Ate vegetables. And when it wanted to junk – because you have to reward your body- it ordered from Naked Pizza in Westlands, which is what the Nairobi’s weight and socially conscious crowd do when they want to look cool living healthy.
Then one-day Samsung Galaxy woke up and boom, things had changed. It had become the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Enter stage, right.
Don Draper, the quintessential cool-Neanderthal in Mad Men once said, “Great beauty inspires great emotion.” He didn’t know it then, but he could have been referring to the Samsung S4.
Think of the S4 as a better S3. Even more contextualized, think of the S4 as an ex who was formerly an S3. Are we together class? Guys over there at the back, are we together?
No man will admit this but there is this party line that we all wish our exes well. It’s a heap of smouldering croak. We dont. We want to run into our exes and find them doing badly without us. We want to find the miserable and down to their luck. We want to find them with dry lips and bad shoes. We want to hope that she is dating a complete Orang-outang and she is so miserable and stressed with that hairy joke she gets her menses twice a month because her hormones are screwed up.
Because if we ran into her and she is looking like a flower that has finally bloomed (Tamms used that word the other day and it made me so proud I wanted to put her in my pocket) we will feel like we were the ones dragging her behind. If we run into her looking hot and moved on and very sexy we will feel lousy for letting go. And a part of us will want her back. And she won’t want us back. Because she now knows better. Or now gets better. That Orang-outang.
The S4 is that ex that looks good, the one who was the S3.
It’s that ex you will run into in a snazzy bar, cozying up with the new guy. And she will look bewitching. And you will walk over like a gent and say hallo and she will introduce you to the Orang-outang as Kim or Tim, of Felix (it’s always a name like that) and he will smile like a true prince and say nice to meet you and as you walk away he will turn to her and ask, “Is that Biko, THE jackass?” and she will nod and hold her throat pretending to choke herself and she will guffaw. But he won’t laugh to hard because he is a guy and he knows this is a carousel, that today you are the prince but tomorrow you are the jackass. He will understand that we all are someone’s ex. So he will chuckle and go back to his drink.
Look. You don’t know what you have till its gone. But here is one thing you will be glad you didn’t have in the S3…the plastic case. The S4 has a sexy chrome-like case. And the screen is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3. I don’t know what that is, but if you told me a gorilla is protecting my screen, I will sleep knowing that my screen is safe. Plus the phone comes with this warranty that allows you to get a new screen fixed for free should the Gorilla be asleep as your friend reverses on your phone outside Mercury.
Another thing. The S4 went to the gym and got lighter (130g) than the S3 (133g). Which means if it falls on your toe it won’t feel like it’s a Nokia 5110 that’s fallen on it. Or a Motorola DynaTac 8000X (Google it, it looks like a Ukrainian missile).
Although I love the weight and shape of the S4 I miss the feel of the S3. The S3 was curvaceous. It had corners that seduced your palms. Have you ever held the handle bar of a Ducati? Or held a Samurai sword? Built to be held.
When I held the S3 it would own my hands, it curled inside my palm, like a cat curls around your leg. Its almost like it helped me own it…like a nice pair of ass should. Know what I mean? No? And lets not act puritanical here and turn our nose at my references to the female posterior. I mean, everybody (except expatriates from Western Europe) likes the feel of a full ass in their hands…how it stays, voluptuous in its presence, dominating your hands and waiting for you and your limited – and repetitive – ideas.
The Koreans have created many great things but they will never simulate an ass in hands like what they did with the S3. That phone was built to be held. And this is not lewd guys, this is high art.
In the looks department the S4 triumphs. There is something clean about the phone. Like it spends the whole day having a bubble bath. Something proper about it. Like it knows how to use its cutlery from the outside coming in. Like it will sit like a lady, not like Phillip Mwaniki – fwaaa. You get the feeling that the S4 is a different kind of pedigree when you look at the superior screen that is much brighter and with colours that are far more vivid than any other Android handset I know.
Here is a story.
I got my S4 handset a few days after the launch last month. The following week I happened to have stepped into a bank in Upper Hill to do some banking.
So I’m at the counter filling some form am on my phone using the calculator. Oh by the way the calculator on the S4 as many of its features has been so simplified even my daughter uses it to practice her math. True story.
Anyway, the teller lady all of a sudden asks, “What phone is that. It’s not an S3, is it?”
“It’s actually an S4.”
“It’s out?” She asks unable to mask her surprise. My head grows bigger. I stand on my tiptoes to look taller than the counter height.
“Yes. Came out last week.” Oh, the phony nonchalance.
“Oh cool.” She says before looking back at her screen and I’m assuming she is looking at my account balance to see how much I’m worth to afford the phone. I’m sure she really did everything not to laugh after seeing my balance. Because I do too. All the time.
“Is it any better than the S3 (I’ve gotten that question a lot, people never really compare to the iPhone 5, always the S3)
Do you remember your first phone,” I ask to explain further.
“Ah huh…”
“Now do you remember who you were then, how you felt about owning a mobile phone…how you always wanted it to ring?”
“Yes,” she smiled knowingly.
“Now the S4 revives that feeling.”
“Ah I know what u mean,” she enthuses, then she asks. “Does it have any new cool features?”
So I demo the Air-view and Air-gesture. I show her how you can scroll down the page without touching the screen. Or receive a call without touching the screen, hell or browse down a page without touching the screen.
She is very impressed.
Then I put on my best Jack Nicholson drawl and bullshit her. “See, this phone is like one of those chicks who are so insanely attractive you don’t want to touch them because they look so brittle they might break. So you touch them with your eyes.”
She laughs at that.
“That is the S4. So hot you don’t want to contaminate that beauty with a touch.”
She giggles now because I’m being ridiculous and idle. She shakes her head probably wondering why it has to be the broke guys with the smart mouths. But I have to move on because she might get fired.
The S4 thinks faster and better. It makes decisions faster and it aspires to think like you do. Some of the tweaked the features don’t make sense to me but most are useful.
The Korean blokes in white lab coats have not just built a phone. They have pre-empted your habits, which means they have managed to stay ahead of you without leaving you behind. They have also realised that you want to look better…so they have training thing to make u exercise, because they don’t want your “life companion” looking better than you do.
Which brings to me to my question: How much further can then Koreans push the envelope? If my thoughts count I want a phone that will change colour depending on my mood. Like if I’m broke and I hold it up, it turns pale grey. If my landlord calls and I’m anxious it turns orange. If I call that cat that has owed me money for yonks and he doesn’t pick my calls it turns red. Or if Tamms calls it turns purple her favourite colour, the colour of royalty. Or if it’s an unknown number and it’s who I suspect it is it turns into the colour of an Orang-outang.
Samsung. Over to u.