When I first opened up the box of my Samsung Galaxy S2, I had that brief feel of being on the cutting edge of mobile technology; I’d bought it in October2011, when it was still pretty new, shiny, and ahead of the curve. Of course, as these things go, that feeling didn’t last very long at all — it was rapidly superseded by newer models, and more to the point, pretty soon everyone had one. It was the 2nd best selling phone of that year, only behind the then-hegemonic Apple’s iPhone 4S. The arrival of the S2 felt like a seminal moment in Android-based smartphones; it was one of the first to be common and iconic enough that if felt like it had a strong brand, not just being another iPhone clone. You knew plenty of people around you, especially at my age (I was 24 when I bought it), who had the same phone as you.

My S2 conked out about two months ago, meaning it lasted about two and a half years, a pretty decent return these days. Normally when you say goodbye to something you had for a long time, you remember it with fondness, brief bits of nostalgia. When I ditched the S2, I had another vein of thought: “Thank God I’m finally getting rid of this piece of shit.”

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To be fair, I did cumulatively give as good as I got from the phone. It started its career as I was finishing mine in landscaping, and it went through more than a few accidental trips to the pavement. It had a pretty fast processor, a decent camera, and the screen was nice and big, even if I didn’t think the glass was slightly more abrasive than I would have liked.

The above though demonstrates the problem with cellphone reviews you find all over the place now. A review has to come out as soon as possible .The reviews that are churned out about these phones are useful, but limited in the sense that they’ll necessarily focus on what’s easily quantifiable, and so you end up with a longer version of: “pretty fast processor, decent camera, nice big screen” etc. It’s harder to say what will it be like to use this phone for the next two years of your life.

And many people have; I couldn’t find up to date stats, but as of 18 months ago the S2 had sold around 40 million units. So this is a partial review of why the S2, while great on paper, could be irritating, confusing and oftentimes just plain infuriating to use on a daily basis. I say partial, because in the six weeks or so I’ve had a new phone I think I’ve forgotten many or most of the things that drove me crazy about it.

1. Voice Command, Robotic Woman, and “What would you like to do?”

The engineers at Samsung clearly wanted to push voice command, so they came up with the idea of using the phone’s home button as the trigger for it. Instead of tapping once to be brought to the home screen, just double-tap, and voila! It closes whatever window you were on (so far so good), and brings you to the voice command interface. There you have a robotic woman asking you (very loudly as it turns out, as I noticed during Christmas mass that December), “WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO?”

“Well, I’d like you to fuck off, to be frank,” was my common reply, because in practice this worked horribly. For one, it’s pretty easy to double-tap, if you’re as impatient as I am, the home button, at which point instead of being taken to the home screen, you’ll get Robotic Woman. The more impatient you are, the more likely you are to push the button twice, meaning that as you’re more impatient the phone will actively delay you longer. There was an element of sadism to it, I always felt.

The interval behind the double-taps of the home button also varied wildly — if your phone was processing something else, for example, such as a data-rich webpage, it would process the taps more slowly, meaning it could take several seconds between taps and the phone would still interpret that as you wanting to voice command. This happened all the time: webpage would freeze for awhile, impatient me would hit the home button. Nothing would happen. Impatient me would use considerable restraint, wait a few seconds more, and then hit home button again. And lo and behold, I’d be brought to Robotic Woman. Ditto with you having held the button ever so slightly too long — Robotic Woman again. Occasionally if you hit the button at the wrong time, the slowed-down processor would interpret you as having held it, and brought you — well, you get the point.

I really hated Robotic Woman. She was hard to escape, too. Say you brought yourself to the voice command screen accidentally, and you wanted to get out. You wouldn’t dare hit home again, in fears of plunging into some sort of second circle of Robotic Woman hell. You’d hit the back button. Instead of bringing you to the home page, where you wanted to go in the first place, you’d be brought back to the original page you were trying to escape. Your natural reaction? To hit the home button. Result? Robotic Woman, because for some reason it only took a single tap this time. The only way to avoid this was, upon leaving the voice command interface, to wait at least five seconds. You’d be there, seething with rage, impatient as all hell, counting to five through gritted teeth before daring to hit the little square button again and hoping it took you where you wanted to go for once.

Samsung, it should be pointed out, loved Robotic Woman so much they came up with a clever innovation to protect her: you couldn’t turn voice command off. For all of Android’s wonderful customization potential, Samsung took the single most annoying fucking feature on this phone and made it obligatory.

A minor addendum; it was also easy to accidentally turn on “driving mode” from voice command, which I once unwittingly did and spent weeks trying to figure out why my phone was doing strange things like reading out phone numbers I’d received text messages from (but not the text message itself, which I thought sort of defeated the purpose of the feature), as well as reading out the time of my alarms, who was calling me and more.

If I had a stronger vocabulary, I could express to you how much I hated the way this was set up, and just how infuriating it was to deal with robotic woman time and time again. I’ll go the easy route and just point out that I really, really, really disliked this particular design foible.

2. Random airplane mode

The rest of these will be short, I swear. The phone would occasionally, though often enough, just plain lose its signal. You’d be walking down the street, outdoors, surrounding in a major city by cellphone towers, pull out your phone and realize that for some undetermined amount of time you’ve had no signal. It would kick out, and generally the only way to get it back would be to restart your phone and hope it came back.

3. Consistent wi-fi failure

The S2 had a creative interpretation of what “Wifi:On” meant. Frequently it actually interpreted “on” to be “off.” There may be some sort of technological subtlety between the two I’m not aware of, but generally when I turn Wifi on, I’m going under the expectation that my phone will detect available wifi networks and sign me in to ones to which I’ve already entered the password. This failed to happen at an alarming rate, my phone’s wifi freezing up and connecting to nothing, and caused me to go over my data limit a few months, as I was happily surfing the net, loading up YouP YouTube videos thinking that my wifi was on.

4. The disappearing autocorrect keyboard

That little bar that appears above your keyboard, showing you what letters you’ve typed in, and what they will be autocorrected to? Yeah, for some reason it would disappear now and again. Never for more than say, five minutes, but it would be mildly annoying, particularly with my blunt fingers, to not know exactly what I was typing in the middle of a text conversation, and having to go back and fix either my mistakes or the changes that autocorrect would make.

5. The oddly-sensitive contact list screen

An odder one was the contact list, which had a neat feature in theory. You’d scroll down, and once you came to the contact you liked, you simply would have to swipe all the way to the right to call them, and all the way to the left to text. Except for some reason, here and only here the touchscreen would occasionally be so sensitive that simply putting your thumb near a name would send the little slidey bar caromming off the right, having you make accidental phone calls while you were at it.

6. The heat machine

On random occasions, the phone would heat up to a ridiculous extent, enough to feel extremely hot to the touch, even through a denim jean pocket, and would drain the hell out of my battery. I took it back in when it was under warranty, had them replace first the battery, then the handset, and it the thing still would every so often feel like someone had dropped a chemical handwarmer into my pocket.

Other folks I talked to with the phone ran into the same problems as I did. The phone was bad enough that I refused to buy a Samsung again, even though it was considerably cheaper than the Xperia I bought in the end. And so far, so good with the new one. But who knows? Maybe I’ll think differently in two years.

Did you like this? Please consider following me on Twitter @tlowrie. I’ve been completely neglectful of it and am trying to hide that fact as I currently look for work.