A few of the more committed Sloggers may have noticed that I’ve been posting less than is normal over the last three days. The explanation behind this apparent slacking when I should’ve been slogging is called Sony Xperia tipo Android.

Somewhere in the deep, forever shifting, and far, faraway mists of time – beyond twenty years ago – technical things came onto the market. They were accompanied by instruction manuals written in various languages, none of them gobblydegeek jargobollocks. The instructions bore an at least vague resemblance to the product one wanted to get to know better. When you went through the set-up steps, things predicted in the instruction manual happened on the product. The product then worked. The whole process took perhaps an hour – maybe two if there was a video timeshift mechanism involved.

I’ve been the proud owner of a Sony smart Xperia tipo Android for four days now, and I have yet to synchronise it with a single app. I have yet to find anything in the ‘quick-set up’ guide that says ‘how to make a phone call’. I have yet to access any of the four messages that have come in. The sole success thus far is that I’ve synced it with my home router for internet access here at Slogger’s Roost: but given that my new acquisition is a mobile communicator, this facility is of – at best – only passing interest to me.

The touchscreen never performs the same function twice. There is no reliable way to return Home when you press Home, no explanation of how to get numbers up on the keyboard, no reason why it keeps sending me back to my own wifi network to connect when I’m already connected, no way to emerge from that vicious circle, and no way to smash the apparatus to pieces with a steel mallet: yes, the final irony of this Japanese revenge for Hiroshima is that the one thing you can’t do is destroy the f**king thing.

I give up on technology suppliers: like bankers are addicted to quants, so too are techie companies addicted to geeks. Both these perncious life-forms think complex is clever. No it isn’t chummy, complexity is failure: Rubik’s cube never had a future and it never got one, because it was a dead-end, clever-arsed waste of time accessible only to kids under five and idiot savants.

Let me explain why I bought this small yet slightly more sadistic version of The Camp on Blood Island. It will enable me to Tweet, Youtube and in extremis upload Slog posts wherever I am. Were I to catch Jeremy Frunt-Bottomley in the act of flogging a chimney sweep to death, it would enable me to take the shot and upload it with the final revelation of his iniquitous nature. That’s what the young man (and very polite he was too) in the O2 shop said – except for the Jeremy murder scenario – and I had no reason to disbelieve him. And I’m sure that, in the end, if my IQ leaps a 100 points and I grow smaller fingers, such miracles of wireless technology will come to pass.

But in the meantime, it is about as much use as a soap penknife.

There is a point to this beyond letting off steam. Pathetic after-sales support with techie products allows large multinationals to descend deeper and deeper into their silos, and vapourises jobs in the blind pursuit of short-term profits. Were these profits generally ploughed back into useful R&D (like making a simple phone most people could understand) I would feel less irate. But they aren’t: they go into fatcat wallets, and towards the budgets of geeks who invent even more tangentially relevant toys to keep the proles occupied. It is, after all, extremely unikely that any revolution will happen anywhere as long as most discontented citizens are jabbing at a screen and wondering WTF they’ve arrived back again in ‘languages’.

There is an elegance in simplicity, and – sometimes – a great deal of satisfaction to be gained from  sufficiency. There are many days when I wish we still existed in a world that recognises those truths. This has been one of them.