Me against the gadgets

I've come out - briefly - from my blogging hiatus to vent my frustration.

The month of October 2008 should really be called the month of the fragile gadgets.

It all started when my new Sony Ericsson W200i (which hasn't even racked up two months of service, I should say) started having problems. After syncing with my computer one day, every file on the Memory Stick goes corrupt, necessitating a reformatting of the card. This became increasingly frequent and, thinking it was a problem with the Memory Stick, I upgraded to a 2GB card and bought a card reader to minimise the risk of file corruption while connecting and disconnecting from the computer. Then a new problem emerged - the phone started to have difficulties playing M4A audio files.

It would be able to play a number of files of this type in succession, then flag up a "playback failed" message. Switching to an MP3 file and back would cure the problem, but only for a short while before every file - M4A, MP3, even theme files - becomes unreadable and the phone has to be restarted. And then the cycle repeats itself. Doing a master reset on the phone has no effect whatsoever.

To rub salt in the wound, just last Monday, while trying to add pictures into the phone to bring to the school's print shop (I don't have a pen drive, see) both the phone's USB cable AND that stupid cheapo card reader I just bought cease to function properly. But the biggest, most important and possibly the most expensive failure came later that day.

While using my beloved Sony A200 camera, the 18-70mm lens had a tendency to get stuck while focussing. Perplexed, I switched to manual focus mode and rotated the focussing ring to try to free it up a bit, then flicked it back to auto focus. Without warning, the camera vibrated so violently that I had to switch it off to prevent anything else from breaking. Clearly, something was broken in the lens.

Annoyingly and disturbingly, three of the four products mentioned were Sony products.

So today, I brought the phone to the dealer who sold it to me to claim warranty. Idiotic salesman argued that AAC (which Sony Ericsson says the phone can support) and M4A files are two different formats and insisted the I had put in files of the wrong format. He is wrong - AAC is the encoding scheme for audio files, M4A is the file created from this scheme.

Whatever. I'll ask the Sony technicians when I bring the lens (which I seriously hope would be covered under warranty) to the service centre another day (it isn't open on weekends). Until then I'll continue to be worried - the month isn't over yet, and I've still got one working Sony product left (the PSP).

Fingers crossed.

P.S. Pictures of Limkokwing University of Creative Technology's kolam project at Pavilion Kuala Lumpur are now up on Facebook. Check them out.

UPDATE: Checked across forums and it turns out that the playback problem for M4A files is a known bug. Which is depressing - was hoping to take advantage from the higher sound quality of this format compared to MP3s. Ah, well, shit happens.