I love my cell phone. It's awesome. It lets me call people and send instant messages to foreign countries and take pictures and play music and it has a built-in calendar and I even found a free Tetris game for it online! It really is an amazing little tool.

However, it's also in many ways an utter piece of crap.

They really don't make 'em like they used to, ya know? After under a year of use (not abuse!) my Nokia 6230 had already started to malfunction in many ways and it's slowly but steadily getting worse.

For one thing, the "pop-port" socket is crap. It often takes me a few trys to get proper stereo sound out of my handsfree headset. Plug. Unplug. Plug. Unplug. Plug.

I always succeed in the end. When I do the music sounds great thanks to my Sony earphones and headset modification. So I put up with it. After all, it's awesome to be able to use my phone as an mp3 player. I love it. I don't want an iPod at all.

Another problem I have a lot, has to do with the phone's speaker. Sometimes when I answer a call or make a call, it makes an annoying buzzing sound. I quickly discovered that I can usually make the buzzing go away by tapping the phone gently against something.

Usually the most handy 'something' is my own head.

So if you see people walking around, banging their cell phones against their heads, don't jump to the conclusion that they're retarded. Maybe they're just like me, in love with their phones but victimized by Nokia's shoddy quality control.

Maybe when my head starts getting sore from all the tapping I'll think about getting myself a new phone. Maybe it won't be a Nokia.