So, last week The Wife and I took a chunk of the money we received for Christmas and got smartphones. So now I can look as smug as anybody else who’s got a smartphone. In fact, I’m gonna look smug with my new smartphone right now!
Yup, that’s some smartphone, all right! I’ll bet it’s way nicer than your smartphone. Now I’m connected all the time, man! Hooray!!
And yet I can’t help thinking that something’s missing from my life…something real…like I’ve taken a step away from what really matters in life….
Nah.
Fact is, I love this thing. It’s awesome. I don’t want to be without this thing, ever.
Nah, that’s overstating the other way.
Look, it’s a phone. It’s a tool, and it’s easy to use and fun. I can’t believe how many things it does. I know, this won’t be all that shocking to anyone who’s been on the smartphone bandwagon for years, but the idea of all this online content being as available as it is just stuns me. I love having such easy access to e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and everything else. It’s just cool. And the camera on this phone rocks. Instagram is a blast, and it’s so easy with this phone — easier, by several orders of magnitude, than my old combination of regular phone-and-tablet.
This isn’t to say that I’m on the phone more than I was before. I don’t take it to bed, and I don’t look at it for long periods when I’m at work. As many things as it can do, I have a very hard time ever seeing a phone as any kind of writing tool. I like using it to play music — the other day I listened to it for hours, during a long job at The Store — but the computer will remain my primary music tool.
Oddly, I received my first call on the phone eight days after we got them, which I find amusing — it’s funny that we’ve created these devices so that we don’t have to take calls on a thing that’s corded to the wall, and in the course of refining these gizmos, we have so advanced the technology that the very primacy of the phone call concept has fallen on hard times. When I got that call — it was The Wife — I actually had to stare at my new phone for a few seconds, as I tried to figure out how to answer the call.
Some people pull out their phones to check the time, which is farther than I expect I will ever go in my adoption of the phone for all things informational. Proof? Well, here’s the other major piece of tech I got for Christmas:
And for really old-school tech, you can’t go wrong here:
Yup: an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven. To the cookbooks, Batman!
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Awesome! I love my phone. The longer you have it the more things you will find to do with it and the more dependent you will become. Welcome to the dark side. 😉
Lynn: What's funny is that I made veiled hints over the last year or two about how we'd have to upgrade to smartphones sooner or later, and The Wife (who pays that bill, and who thus has more voting power than I, and rightly so!) always pushed it off…until her own coworkers made fun of her own phone! Actually, she's the boss where she works, so her underlings were making fun of her phone. And THAT just would not do! 🙂
Speaking of cookbooks and smartphones, I was just talking to my husband yesterday about an app that has proven its worth over three years (originally got it for my iPad at that time). It's called Paprika and it is essentially a digital recipe box. It certainly won't replace a real recipe box of hand-me-down handwritten recipes or physical cookbooks, but as someone who is a cooking show fanatic I love the ease of googling recipes I see on tv and with two clicks saving them to the app. It's really great for other online recipes too. And of course you can add the classics passed down to you. It's also nice to have the recipes in hand when grocery shopping just to double check that you've remembered everything you need. It is the most expensive app I have ever bought ($10 at that time) but it has lasted the test of time and I think it's a pretty good value.
I'm one step closer…