The smartphone and Internet revolutions passed me by

The mobile Internet and smartphone revolutions are associated with happy, peppy, easygoing but successful, social, friendly, smiling people whose lives are a nonstop blast. You know, like these people. Connecting, (be)friending, chirping, tweeting, perhaps even working and making money. Perhaps multitasking on all of the above, while also walking down Main Street, checking their stock options, and having paani puri!

They are privileged global citizens owning smartphones --- marvels of modern technology that blur the distinctions between phone, computer and television; in other words, utility, work and entertainment. And if they have graduated from smartphones to tablets, that's a prescription for a whole new level of ecstacy.

Carbon dating on my fossils shows that I belong to the previous millenium, so I never expected quite this level of ecstacy. My goals, in buying a smartphone (Samsung Android 2012 dual SIM) and signing up for 3G plans of MTNL and Vodafone, were far more modest:

• Voice calls comparable to my previous Nokia 3230 running Symbian. You know, you punch the number, the other party hears the ring within two seconds, and you start conversing in four seconds, without straining your voice and ears and repeating every sentence five times.
• Receiving one-time passwords from my bank or credit card via SMS before eBay tears down the session and labels me a deadbeat.
• Email and basic near-static Web access. An HTML page with a couple images, or a PDF document about 400kB large, should load in about 10 seconds. No need for multimedia listening or viewing. Would be nice to get Web content a little faster than the first 1200 baud modem I used in 1993.

Before I took the plunge, I was assured by many that all of the above, and much more, were theirs and could well be mine, too.

The MTNL story

Vodafone

The Reliance story

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