Pippa’s phone was stolen, which resulted in a smartphone headache.

I have had a number of different mobile phones in my life. I got my first phone in 1999:  a Nokia 5110, and at the time you could basically just make calls and send texts. Even the latter was new and out there at the time! In the last five years I’ve had an iPhone 3GS, an iPhone 4, a Sony Xperia U, a Motorola Razr, a Huawei Ascend P1 and a Samsung Galaxy S3. To be fair I ended up with a couple of these phones because of my job, I didn’t buy all of them, but of the six, two of them were purchases, most recently my Galaxy S3.

And then it was stolen. A somewhat traumatic smash and grab left me without my phone and, weirdly, the charging cable for my TomTom GPS device (the thief thought he was stealing the charger for my phone no doubt). I was forced to revert back to my old iPhone 4 (yes, not even a 4S), and it is painfully, agonisingly slow. It doesn’t respond well to new iOS updates, it lags, the camera is horrible and basically I’m counting the months until I can upgrade my contract.

Sure you might argue that I made the mistake of not insuring my phone, and that’s a fair criticism. If it had been insured I would have walked out of the shop with a new Galaxy, a smile on my face and a spring in my step. That said, at the time I bought the contract, my service provider wanted to charge me some obscene amount for insurance. I had also never had a phone stolen before, so I couldn’t really have considered the impact this would have on my day-to-day life. #FirstWorldProblems right?

It doesn’t help that I’ve attended a number of new phone launches in the past couple of weeks, so I have an insane amount of phone jealousy right about now. I don’t even mind that one of them is a Windows Phone – I would take it. The iPhone 4 looks minuscule by comparison, plus it’s surprisingly heavy.

Of course everything is merely about adjusting to change. My transition from iOS to Android gave me a better-rounded understanding of the differences between them, but it also highlighted the limitations. I might even learn to learn to use Windows Phone comprehensively given the chance. I made the smooth transition from iOS to Android and couldn’t have been happier. Granted it took me a bit of time to stop pressing the button at the bottom of the phone and to figure out that I needed to kill apps all the time (I’m not accepting this, it’s really annoying and every “auto kill background processes” app I tried never really worked properly), but I adjusted and learned to live with it.

Sure, none of these operating systems are perfect. But I do miss my Galaxy – it’s going to be a long time till October.

Photo courtesy of Tim Hulme.

Makeup artist: Natasha Carstens.

Article first appeared in TechSmart 126.