eBay auctions are done for a little while. Have gotten an amazing amount of closet space back, made a fair hunk of cash, now I need to decide what I want to auction off next.

Of course, one of the perils of eBay is the buying side of things.

Case in point: QR Codes. Hang on, I’m getting there. QR Codes are these 2D barcodes that you see on virtually everything that comes out of Japan. Usually they’re used to encode URLs so you don’t have to type them in, that sort of thing. It annoys me that they exist and I can’t read them, since virtually every phone that comes out in Japan can be used to decode them. The Japanese get cooler cell phones than us, I guess is the real source of my vexation.

However, one of the great things about there being an infinite number of geeks at an infinite number of keyboards out there, some of them have the same vexations I do and are much better at coding. Hence I found that there is a QR-code reader application for cell phones I might actually be able to buy. Not that it works on my Razr V3c of course, I couldn’t be that lucky.

One of the phones it does run on is the Nokia 6630, which also turns out to be one of the VERY few phones that will work on a GSM network (like we have here in the US, over in Europe and in fact most of the world) AND will work on the phone standard in Japan that almost no other country uses. In theory… and this is in theory only… when I’m over in Japan this August, if I were to have a phone like this, I would be reachable in case of emergency. Presumably at a hideous price per minute with the roaming fees taken into account, but the option of communication is there.

So… obviously I need to buy one. Off to Google I went, and found that I had the following options in this country:

1) Buy it new from a gray-market importer that would probably take my money, promise to ship me a phone, never ship the phone, disappear into the ether and send someone over to break my legs if I complained.

2) Buy from an Amazon storefront. The only time I’ve ever bought anything from an Amazon storefront (not Amazon itself, mind you, I know there’s a difference), they took my money and never sent me anything. Fortunately it was only a $10 DVD, but still… I’m a bit wary of ordering that way. Also they’re considerably more expensive than the other gray market importers and if I’m going to have my money taken and no phone provided the least they could do is be price competitive. Maybe they spend the extra cash on really GOOD leg breaking guys.

3) Buy a used one off eBay. Advantage: 1/3rd the price of the Amazon storefront people, 1/2 the price of the creepy gray market importer, and at least the guy has 180+ feedback so I might actually get the phone.

I am in the twitchy bit of the eBay experience, though, and you may be familiar with it: It’s the bit where you’ve sent someone money via Paypal but haven’t heard anything yet so you’re not sure he’s really going to get you the thing you paid for and you spend way too much time looking at his feedback going “is this real feedback? did he just make up some fake accounts to make himself look good?” when in reality I’ve only had ONE bad experience with eBay and that was as a seller – I’ve never NOT gotten an item bought from eBay, so really I should just relax.

In the meantime though, I’m twitchy.