#oneaday Day 159: To upgrade… or downgrade?

I’m due an upgrade on my phone, and for the first time I’m holding off because I’m not sure I want one. All the new phones are rammed with AI bullshit and I don’t want to encourage that crap in any way whatsoever, so the prospect of getting one makes me a tad uneasy.

The other thing that is causing me to hold off is a growing desire to break my attachment to smartphones. I don’t like being dependent on a smartphone. I don’t like having that stupid black rectangle follow me everywhere I go. I don’t like feeling like I compulsively “have” to fiddle with it if I don’t have anything to say or anything to do.

There are a few things stopping me from immediately ditching my smartphone and “downgrading” to a modern feature phone. I thought I’d ponder each of them in turn. I probably won’t come to a conclusion, but it might help me sort some things out in my mind. And maybe it’ll be helpful for you, too, I don’t know.

I don’t use WhatsApp as much as a lot of people, but I do have a few ongoing chats that are my sole means of connection with friends I haven’t seen for a while. On top of that, the people from my job use WhatsApp for communication outside of work — for example, when we’re having a group social trip together.

Giving up WhatsApp would mean giving up a connection to people I don’t want to “disconnect” from entirely, and would also make life inconvenient for my work colleagues. That last one I’m not super concerned about, but I do like my job and my colleagues, so I don’t really want to be a pain.

Beyond those maybe two group chats (both of which have declined in activity anyway) and my work colleagues, I’m not super attached to WhatsApp. I could probably live without it.

The camera

Phone cameras these days are pretty excellent. I shoot anything that isn’t direct capture from gaming hardware on my phone. Upgrading my phone would mean I can get an even better camera.

However, two things: 1) I can still use the camera on my existing phone even if it doesn’t have a SIM card in it (I think, anyway). And 2) I could just, y’know, buy a nice camera.

So while it’s certainly convenient to be able to snap photos and take video with a device that is with me anyway, it’s probably not actually a dealbreaker in this situation.

Music and podcasts

I am, I’m afraid, “part of the problem” with music, though not out of any belief that streaming is “better” than having your own collection of tunes. It’s just a lot more convenient to be able to stream music (I use YouTube Music, because I have YouTube Premium and might as well use the additional benefit) and podcasts from, again, a device I have with me anyway. Plus my phone’s Bluetooth connects to my car stereo with no difficulty, making it easy to queue up entertainment for long journeys, such as my monthly drive to the office.

I haven’t looked at standalone MP3 (or equivalent) players for probably 20+ years at this point. I’m sure they exist. In fact, hold on.

It seems I can get a cheap Chinese shitbox for £20-£30, or I can spend three thousand pounds on a gold Sony thing (just £659.80 a month!) if I’m feeling particularly insane. What the actual fuck.

Uh… anyway. MP3 players do indeed still exist, and many of them have Bluetooth. Some of them even have WiFi, and some of them take the iPod touch approach where they’re basically a phone without the “phone” bit. I will steer clear of those, at least, because that would just be replacing one problem with the same problem, but mildly less convenient.

So an MP3 player with a decent capacity is not expensive. That would require me to organise my MP3 library, though, which has been in a right state since Google Music (RIP) invited me to upload it all “to access anywhere”, then promptly closed down and was replaced with the considerably inferior YouTube Music… and when I downloaded it all again the organisation was all fucked.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world to have to do that, but I’d rather not have to. So I think we can consider the music player side of things covered.

Navigation

In-car navigation is easily solved: buy a satnav. But I also use Google Maps when I’m on foot to see what’s nearby and figure out how to get to places. That is a problem that is a little trickier to solve. GPS devices for on-foot navigation certainly exist, but they’re primarily geared towards hiking and cost more than I’d be willing to spend on something that I’d only use occasionally, particularly if I had already bought a satnav for the car.

I can’t see an easy solution to this one. I believe some feature phones are able to access a Web-based form of Google Maps, but I don’t know how useful or effective that is.

I mean, I guess I could kick it really old school and just buy an A to Z of wherever I happened to be going. I can’t check what time Sainsbury’s closes with one of those, though, unless they’ve considerably enhanced the level of detail they go into since I last used one.

Conclusion?

I could probably find solutions to all of the above problems, except WhatsApp. I believe there are some feature phones that are capable of using a text-only version of WhatsApp, but from a cursory glance around earlier today it seems a lot of them don’t work in the UK for some reason.

I will continue to mull it over. The prospect of truly breaking free from the smartphone becomes increasingly appealing day by day… I’m just not quite sure I’m truly ready to pull the plug. My main concern is suddenly running into a use case that I haven’t thought of while farting this blog post out of an evening, and then being kind of fucked when I’m stuck with a modern-day Nokia and no means of fulfilling the function I suddenly, urgently require.

But really, what might that even be? It can’t be that important, or I would have thought of it by now, surely.

Anyway, I haven’t reached a definitive conclusion. But I have definitely convinced myself that there are at least some of the features I use on my smartphone that I absolutely can live without. Is that enough, though?

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1579: “Android?”

I took a bold step and did something very brave today. I… I…

I switched from iOS to Android.

Okay, “very brave” might be understatement of the century, but despite being curious about Google’s mobile OS, I’ve resisted the temptation to ditch the iPhone series to date, largely because I felt that I was too invested in the iOS ecosystem to make breaking free practical.

I pondered this recently, though, and realised that I actually wasn’t all that dependent on the iOS ecosystem at all. I run my mail, contacts and calendars through Google, I socialise through Facebook, Twitter and Google+, I take notes in Evernote and… well, that’s about it, to be frank; I’m not an especially adventurous mobile user these days, largely because I feel that 95% of apps released these days are superfluous, pointless crap that no-one needs.

And so it is that I find myself with an HTC One “Don’t Call Me Mate” M8 Android handset. It’s a rather larger handset than the iPhone 4S I was using before, and it’s larger than Andie’s iPhone 5S, too. I once thought that large phones were worthy of mockery, but having been using the HTC for a day I’m already feeling the benefit of the larger screen size. It’s not a huge amount bigger than an iPhone, but it’s a significant enough difference that things don’t feel nearly as cramped.

Bringing mail, contacts and calendars across was straightforward and easy because I was using Google. The one thing I was a little concerned about was being able to manage my music — something that I have, to date, relied on iTunes for. It turns out that Google’s Google Music service has seemingly been designed for this exact situation, allowing you the ability to upload up to 20,000 tracks directly from your iTunes library to then be available for streaming or caching from anywhere. You can listen to them via the Chrome-based web player, or on your Android phone. There’s even an optional Spotify-like subscription service where you can stream music you don’t own, so as of today I’ve cancelled my Spotify Premium account and gone with Google instead.

There are things to adjust with on the new phone. Not having notifications on the lock screen is very odd having had them for several generations of iOS hardware, but this is more than made up for by the fact you can dismiss all notifications at once from the notification centre. I haven’t delved particularly into the customisation side of things yet, but I understand with a bit of fiddling and tweaking it’s possible to rectify this behaviour if it really bothers me.

There are a few things I really like. The fact that if you download an app and discover it’s shit, you can delete it and automatically receive a refund if you do so within 15 minutes of purchasing. The way apps work together, sharing information much more easily than on iOS. The way the on-screen keyboard does a fake “haptic feedback” thing where it vibrates very slightly every time you press a key. The camera on this particular device is supposed to be very good, too, but I haven’t really tried it as yet.

So far I’m very happy with the new device so far, particularly as the tariff I’ve moved to post-upgrade is, for once, actually a better deal than the one I was on previously. I’m paying the same and getting more cellular data allowance plus “4G” speeds where they’re available, so the overall experience should be superior. I’m looking forward to exploring what it’s capable of further; it’s a pleasant and fun change, and wasn’t riddled with nearly as many difficulties as I was expecting.

But don’t worry. I’m not going to become one of those douchebags who comments on every article about a new iOS app/game and just says “Android?” like a brainwashed parrot. iOS is still great at what it does, and if you claim to be a lover of tech, you should be interested and curious in all the alternatives out there rather than swearing blind corporate allegiance to one company purely because they make the handset you currently own.

But that’s probably a discussion for another day. I’m going to go and lie in bed and fiddle with my phone for a bit now. Or possibly just play Nanaca Crash on it.

#oneaday, Day 269: Things To Do While Waiting For The Phone To Ring

Of all the items of technology the human race has ever invented, the humble phone is surely one which has the greatest hold over our lives. It can make us drop what we’re doing and run off somewhere. It can make us laugh, make us cry, make us scared. And it can make us wait. Wait for hours.

You might be waiting for the results of a job interview. An STD test. A loved one’s driving test. You might be waiting for a special person to call. You might be hoping that someone from your place of work doesn’t call because you skived off today and you think someone might have seen you on your lunch break. You might be waiting for a utility company to “call you back” with the results of an enquiry you made six months ago.

In short, you could be waiting for lots of things. Which means you could be spending an awfully long time sitting and staring at your phone, particularly if you’re kicking yourself that you gave the person you’re expecting to call you back your landline number. Because who the hell uses landlines any more anyway? Mobile’s where it’s at. With a mobile phone you don’t have to sit and stare at the phone, willing it to ring. Of course, in practice all that happens is you tend to sit on the couch with your mobile nearby instead of near the phone table. Because you don’t dare go anywhere in case you miss an important phone call. And heaven forbid if you ever have to answer an important phone call while you’re engaged in toilet activity of the sitting-down variety. (“Is that an echo?” they’ll say. “Where are you?” “In a cave,” you’ll reply, a little too quickly. “A cave with a mobile mast on top of it.”)

So what to do while you’re waiting for the phone to ring? It can’t be anything which you have to commit to, because you might have to drop everything at a moment’s notice to go and answer the phone call. It can’t be anything that gets your hands dirty, because no-one likes picking up a phone with dirty hands. And it can’t possibly be anything which requires you to go outside, because then other people might hear you discussing your itchy parts with the nurse.

So, here are five suggestions.

1. Pair up your socks.

You’ve been meaning to do it for months. And you haven’t. So instead of sitting staring into space, why not make a start on it? Pairing up your socks is a job that you can easily leave unfinished and go back to, months later sometimes. Hence, it is an eminently waiting-for-phone-call-friendly activity. Experienced professionals with cordless phones can even continue pairing their socks while they are on the phone.

2. Play a casual game.

This is what casual games like Bejeweled, Peggle and the like were made for. Playable in short bursts, easy to jump out of at a moment’s notice if you need to and actually fun for those few minutes you’re waiting, they also give your brain a bit of a workout. Unless it’s Farmville, in which case all you’re working out is your clicking finger. Moo.

3. Play “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” on Wikipedia.

Here’s how this works. Pick two completely disparate topics. Open the Wikipedia page for one. Using six clicks or less, you must navigate your way to the second topic using only the hyperlinks within the Wiki articles.

4. Bleach the toilet.

You’ve been complaining for weeks that the toilet stinks, so go and squirt some bleach down it. This takes a matter of seconds. And if the phone rings once you’ve bleached it, it’ll be time to flush by the time you’re off the phone again.

5. Make me a coffee.

Well go on. Don’t just sit there.