May as Well Have Been Talking Swedish

Today kina closes an era.

I’m retiring the old LG flip phone, which I’ve used for I don’t know how long. We’ve had it on a pay-as-you-go plan forever, and it’s served well. Usually, I either forgot to bring it with me, forgot to turn it on, or just never heard the ring or felt the buzz when someone was calling.

I enjoyed it, though. A few times one of my scouts – typically one of the new ones – asked to borrow my phone, likely because he wanted to look something up on the Internet. The looks on those faces when I handed over the phone were precious. And they weren’t shy about dissing its antiquity.

“Ew,” one scout said when he looked at the phone in a pizza parlor (I’m old enough I say pizza parlor). “It has buttons.”

Whenever I handed it over, I felt like the Swedish Chef handling his blunderbussen. And I was fine with that. I knew how the blunderbussen worked.

But no more.

Today I switch over to a smartphone.

That doesn’t necessarily bode well.

Though I have used my Kindle Fire extensively, I don’t have a good track record with smartphones. I had to borrow one a few years ago to make a call at work, and when the call was over I had no idea how to hang up. (I’m so old I talk about hanging up when I’m making a phone call. I also still dial a number.)

When my wife is driving and needs me to do something with her phone, it inevitably boils down to her pulling over somewhere so she can figure out what I did to it.

But my wife found a killer family cell phone plan and decided, with older phones languishing in drawers, it was time to get them in use. So we all have phones – with the exception of the youngest, who does not. He and his mother discussed the situation over the weekend behind closed doors. I don’t know what kind of deal she struck or what kind of logic she used, but he seems if not necessarily OK with the situation, at least resigned to it. Further bulletins as events warrant on that front to be sure.

We spent two hours at the Tmobile store over the weekend, getting the new plan set up. My wife was in charge of that. I mainly spent my time wandering the store and blowing my nose in a discreet manner. I was dispatched to look at phones on their Big Wall O’ Phones, and was tempted to point out the newish-looking flip phone there. Found out it won’t work with the plan we’re looking at. So I found a few possibilities and then went home to look at them elsewhere. Found the one my father-in-law recommended (more than the one I was looking at) for $40 less than the store had it, so that’s where we went.

Man Without Smartphone

UPDATE: Farhad Manjoo's call in Slate.com for a cheaper iPhone, coincidentally, falls with the announcement that Apple may offer a free iPhone 3G on contract starting in the fall. Still doesn't get me around the ol' monthly charge for cell/data service, however . . .

The only way I could be more backwards – or maybe retro, given hipster affectations for All Things Old Except Politics – in the world of telephony is if I went to the thrift store and brought home one of those rotary dial phones they have there. While I’d look a bit silly toting one of those onto the bus for my morning and evening commute, it would certainly be less expensive (and, yes, less useful) than a modern cell phone.

But I have one of those. Well, modern in the may it cal make phone calls from pretty much everywhere the bus goes (though I can’t make calls form inside my building, too much RF interference from the engineers’ radios next door). I have a randomly-branded and –named dumbphone through Tmobile, pay-as-you-go, that costs us maybe $50 a year.

That’s why I don’t have a smartphone. Sure, I can’t browse the internet or get email on my dumbphone (and I don’t even carry that with me; it’s pretty much my wife’s phone), but I also sure don’t spend $50, $60, or $80 a month for the privilege of having a smartphone to mess around with.

Farhad Manjoo, over at Slate, argues that Apple needs to come out with a cheaper iPhone to help the unwashed masses like myself dive into the world of smartphones.

Not so. While I might balk at the idea of paying $200 for a top of the line iPhone if I were interested in getting a smartphone, what steers me from smartphones (and cell phones in general) is not the price of the phone, but the price of the monthly service. I don’t have $600 to $1000 to toss into cell phone coverage for a year. Remember how I said we spend less than $50 a year on our current cell phone? That’s all I’m willing to pay.

Would it be nice to have email and internet capability all the while I’m on the 1 ½ hour bus ride home? Yes, it would. Is it necessary? No. So I look at the opportunity cost and decide I’d rather spend that money on something else.

Ah, many argue – you still have a landline at home. That costs you about $35 a month – $420 a year – plus the at-home high speed internet service, another $360 a year. Yes I do. But don’t compare apples to oranges here.

I could eliminate the landline and substitute a smartphone for it. But I’m still spending more money for phone service. Moving money from one bucket to another and calling it a cost savings (which is what most people tout when they brag they’ve gotten rid of their landline) is disingenuous. And while there are ways to tether cell phones to work as high-speed internet lines, cell phone carriers are clamping down on that – all that internet browsing is cutting down on the bandwidth others might want to use, for, say, making a phone call. So I’d have to retain my at-home high speed internet and pay extra to have an internet-capable smartphone. I just can’t pry the wallet open far enough to do that.

So I will remain smartphoneless. And not unhappily so.

Uncharted and Smartphones

From what I hear, smartphones are all the rage. They’re the latest thing. They’re – I think the word is – keen.

I’ll tie an onion to my belt and take your word for it. And John Milligan’s. He successfully used his Droid smartphone to take a photo and upload it to his personal profile at www.uncharted.net.

Big deal, you say. Folks have been doing similar things since the time we called nickels bees and could say nonsensical things like “Gimme five bees for a quarter.”

But this is significant.

We want our Explorers to use our website through a mobile world. Why be tethered to a desk to make an update to your profile, upload a photo, or even a story, if you’re good at touchscreen or itty-bitty keyboard typing? We expect our Explorers are mobile now, and will only get more mobile as the future unfolds.

John’s shown us it can be done. Huzzah for him, I say. He makes me want to replace our circa 2001 T-Mobile cameraless cell phone with that nifty little bowling game on it for something newer. Tell me, do they make a smartphone with dials now? I like to make sparks when I place a call . . .