HARDWARE
Until recently, I was perfectly happy chatting on my standard matte-black Nokia 6160. Then a colleague bought an 8860, the $800 silver "cigarette lighter" phone and heat-seeking status symbol, and it easily outshone my drab workhorse.
I was brooding about this when I stumbled across Tokyo Motor Trenz, a tiny store in San Francisco's Japantown, where you can pick up a couple of microscale plastic Godzillas along with those performance accessories for your Honda Accord. But the real action is at the back counter, where Motor Trenz (www.tokyomotortrenz.com) can customize any Nokia 5100- or 6100-series phone. Motor Trenz goes way beyond the familiar snap-on faceplate. Like an automotive chop shop, it dismantles handsets and replaces the works with tricked-out parts - iridescent covers with glow-in-the-dark backs, rainbow-patterned buttons, showy antennas, and souped-up battery packs. One procedure entails putting a "tattoo" - an illustrated little transparency - under the LCD's glass screen. You can choose from thousands of themes - from Pokémon to porno.
The Trenz techs voided my warranty with a few turns of a #6 Torx wrench, installing a see-through case and matching transparent battery pack with lights that flash like Christmas whenever they sense cell phone activity - even from neighboring phones. I decided that I also had to have a clear antenna (with an internal "laser" LED that shoots a beam of blue light from its tip), a transparent-blue keypad, and some tiny Bruce Lee wallpaper as the tattoo. I'll admit that, once I saw my phone lying cracked open like a patient on an operating table, I got carried away with the circuit-board modifications. George, a guy with a soldering gun, replaced a number of chips and lightbulbs; now the LEDs and buttons that used to be dull green light up in radioactive blue.
These pyrotechnics will cost you: All the cosmetic surgery came to around $300. But now my piece is so over the top it breaks the ice at every party. To hell with high-end phones - my cell rocks true trenz.
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