M35

Once upon a long ago, I used to work for Mediasolv.com Inc. They were one of the key partners when Dialog Axiata famously ambushed' Celltell's [email protected] launch. It took celltell (now Etisalat) years to recover from that trauma, Dialog never did.

Those days [email protected] was the big thing (WTF is [email protected] ? go get your diaper changed and stop reading this right now). My first [email protected] phone was a siemens M35, that was a lovely shockproof and waterproof device. Those days phones still had antennae this one did not.

I had a great time dropping this phone on the floor of the office lunch room, picking it up and washing it at the sink immediately afterwards. It lasted only a few days before everyone cottoned onto it.

The phone was dropped a total of 34 times without breaking (yes I counted), the 35th time was on a holiday, I was at the office though. It was the day of my performance review in fact (yes, I did get a decent raise even though the .com bubble had burst by that time). Afterwards I went downstairs to head home but found the CEO's car blocking mine. When I went back upstairs he threw me his keys and in the process of catching it dropped my beloved phone. It's LCD stuck the sharp edge of the skirting and cracked. So it was a day of mixed fortunes.

I loved that phone so much that the replacement was another M35! that one turned out to be not waterproof! the very first time I washed it water seeped inside and the phone promptly died! This time I replaced with an S55. So that salary hike really didn't do much good. And with in six months the company was struggling to pay any salaries at all.