Day Two

Doesn't sound the same without someone saying that in a northern accent. 

Amazingly, after only going to bed about 1am, I woke at 8am this morning, admittedly some time after my alarms started going off. I have the guy coming round to carry out the annual service on my boiler, so needed to be up at that time, as it's an all day appointment. 

I did manage to go out yesterday, and thankfully, no dizziness or other sign of the virus I'd been suffering from lately.  I went into town by bus to the Three store. 

As I'd mentioned before I've been considering upgrading my phone and getting a new Blackberry Q10, as I really don't appreciate the touchscreen keyboard on my Wildfire S. It's a good little phone, but I think the only way to really have a touchscreen keyboard that works very well would be on something much, much bigger. The Q10 is rather larger (about a third larger) than the Wildfire S,  but not so much as the larger Android phones that have a touchscreen probably large enough for me to like. Basically, we're starting to converge on tablet territory. 

So, knowing that I can't upgrade online yet (as I'm a little early for the end of the contract), but I can go into a store and do it there I called the very helpful Charlie at the store in Portsmouth. He told me that the upfront cost of the handset had gone down, and so had the monthly package cost , if only by a couple of quid. Feeling this pretty much made it a no-brainer and bringing the cost of the exercise down to a level I felt comfortable with. He was able to do some of the work over the phone for me, so that I literally only had to turn up and complete the paperwork and I was done. 

So turned up I did, and it was at the point that Charlie was processing the handset and completing the contract that I just asked him to confirm that the Q10 was indeed the one with the qwerty keyboard. The slightly older Z10 is all touchscreen, I'm sure a great phone, but if the whole reason for me to do this was to get back to a phone with a keyboard, then I'd be missing the point. Also the only thing, to me, that makes a Blackberry a Blackberry is the keyboard, so one without one just doesn't make sense. A bit like buying a vegetarian burger because you fancy some chicken. It was fortunate that I asked him this, because he had indeed got the Z10 instead of the Q10. Had I signed up and taken the thing home I would have then had all sorts of problems changing it back again. 

He seemed such a nice lad that I didn't fancy kicking up a stink. I have a weakness for a cute smile. Having gotten the phone home, and installed the apps I want, which isn't many and set up the access to the email, facebook and twitter accounts I have found that I am liable to interact more, because typing responses are a hell of a lot easier with the keyboard than with anything I could do on a touchscreen. Even using 'swiftkey' it was still a pain on the Wildfire S. 

Now if only the heating engineer would turn up to check my boiler over, I can get on with the rest of my day.