Question of the Week: A Useful Smartphone?

It’s time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics.

This week’s question: what was the first smartphone you ever used, and what was the first time you decided it was useful and not a waste of money?

For myself, it was in 2013 when I got my first smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S3. I hadn’t wanted to get a smartphone, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to find non-smartphones, so I finally bit the bullet and moved into the new technology. At the time I hugely resented it since I just wanted another flip phone.

When did I find it useful for the first time? I remember it distinctly. I was working in IT support at the time, and the next day I had to go activate some network ports in another building. The building in question had been built in the 90s before Wi-Fi, and so every room had something like a billion Ethernet ports in it. But network switches are expensive, and even though the building had something like five hundred Ethernet ports, only forty-eight of them could be active at any one time since that was how many ports the network switch had. So when anyone moved offices, an IT support minion (me) had to go over there and move the active network ports in the network closet.

I used to take a notebook with me on those kinds of calls so I could write down the port numbers and then match them up to the appropriate ports in the switch closet. But as I was doing this, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to write down the port numbers, I could just take a picture of them and then look at the picture on my phone!

This was much more efficient than writing down a bunch of port numbers, and that was the first time I saw a smartphone as a useful tool instead of just an expensive toy.

The inspiration for this week’s question was a recent email I got from a reader complaining at how the characters in SILENT ORDER still use “phones” even though it’s far in the future.

-JM