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It’s sad to hear that Kodak is filing for bankruptcy. And I’m sure a lot of people felt a tinge of nostalgia at hearing the news. Though in a way, it’s well overdue. I mean, who uses rolls of film these days?

I last owned a Kodak camera well over a decade ago. It was one of the first digital cameras on the market, with three megapixels to boot. And you could do cool stuff like photo sharing and home printing. But it wasn’t long before other, slimmer, fancier digital cameras flooded the market and suddenly my Kodak seemed rather old-fashioned. From then on, with the emergence of everything digital, well, we really haven’t heard anything from Kodak.

But still, the name is synonymous with the world of cameras, having been around for 131 years. It was the first to introduce an apparatus that even a child could use, making photography a simple recreation that anyone could enjoy. As a matter of fact, I have an aunt who still refers to any camera as “a Kodak,” which goes to show how ubiquitous the brand once was. And of course, we still talk about a “Kodak moment” when talking about an event that is particularly memorable, because for a long time the easiest way to record that event was with Kodak film or a Kodak camera.

However, such is life these days. Technology demands that everything must change in a matter of months rather than years, and producers of new gadgets must churn out their new features before others beat them to it. Miss that window of opportunity and it could cost them their company. The demise of Kodak is just the final nail in the coffin of the 20th century.

From the consumer’s perspective, it’s not that we really need or use all these new features that make these gadgets irresistible. It’s the fact that they offer the idea of newness. Faster, lighter, sleeker, bigger capacity, higher resolution, etc. Though not necessarily more efficient.

For example, my super-duper mobile phone can do practically everything. However, half of the time it freezes as it tries to juggle all the stuff it’s trying to do (download e-mail, synchronize calendars, update Twitter, receive group messages) — stuff that has nothing to do with making phone calls, which was why the mobile phone was invented in the first place.

My first mobile phone was, by the way, a Siemens. There was nothing wrong with it, but then a smaller one came along, which also got chucked when one with a camera came along, and so on and so forth, until the average time for holding onto a gadget became less than a couple of years.

There was a time when you needed one gadget for writing letters, essays and memos, one gadget to record video, another to record sound, a nice leather-bound Filofax for your notes, a handsome agenda on your table and perhaps even a digital personal organizer (I went through a couple, but kept losing them in the back of taxis). And if we want to really go back to the dark days before computers, a typewriter (mine was an Olympus) whose ribbon you had to change from time to time, so your fingers were either black with ink or white with Tipp-Ex, the typing correction fluid.

And then there was the camera with the cartridge films of 24 and 36 photos (color or black and white) that you took to the store to have developed and printed. This was always my Kodak moment in the real sense of the word. The anticipation of opening up the envelope with the photos to see how well (or badly) they had turned out and the pleasure of showing them to others. Yes, even mailing copies to faraway friends and then putting them neatly in one’s photo albums.

With today’s newfangled gadgets that can do almost everything at a touch of a button, it is this Kodak moment that I miss. I can take hundreds of pictures with my mobile phone and yet never get to really enjoy them properly, especially when I change phones and the pictures get deleted or transferred to a computer that gets outdated and never switched on.

What is more, with practically every gadget able to take pictures, the sheer effort of putting them together, deleting the bad ones, filing them and uploading them is just too time consuming — not to mention the fact that all those megabytes place a burden on my poor computer’s memory. And the number of photos recording the moment are too numerous to make any of the pictures special.

The last time my photo album was updated was in 1999. And when I do finally get around to getting my photos printed and putting them in the album, I will already know what the photos look like and how well they turned out. There will not be a Kodak moment.

Desi Anwar is a senior anchor at Metro TV. She can be contacted at desianwar.com and dailyavocado.net.