My Dumb Phone
I have a problem with phones: I hold onto them for too long. The Fierce Reads tour proved this to me. Ann Aguirre, Lish McBride, Marissa Meyer, and naturally our publicist Kate, all had smart phones.
I'm a pretty early adopter of technologies, but for some reason I'm a Luddite about phones. I hate it when my land-line rings; it will almost never be someone I want to talk to, except when it's my mom or my mother-in-law, who believe that cell phones are something you take in your car, switched off, in case of emergency. Oh my glob, is this the category I'm in?
I've shut off the web function of my phone and my kids' phones (they're on the same plan with me). I mean, seriously, we were getting charged $1.99 every time we accidentally hit the Internet button, and there's not much you can do online with a 1.5-inch screen anyway.
The sound quality of the speaker and microphone are really awful, probably because I once dropped the phone in the toilet and it gets coated twice a week in clay grit from the tennis courts. So I use my cell phone almost exclusively to exchange texts with family and friends. But for texting, my "dumb" phone is relentlessly adequate: it has a qwerty keyboard, and it takes (marginally acceptable) photos, like this one of my daughter's cake pops, which I had to show to my son in L.A.:
Hmm, the photo is a bit fuzzy, isn't it?
On the tour, however, my fellow authors were updating our activities on Twitter in real time, while I was checking in, totally exhausted at the end of a long day, on the hotel Internet. All three of them were able to keep up with their e-mail during the down-time at airports. Lish showed me adorable photos of her little boy on her iPhone—crisp photos.
And then there's the small matter of finding one's way around while traveling. I had to map out a jogging route in each city that looked 1. about the right distance, and 2. safe. I had to do this ahead of time from the hotel, and if I got lost on the way I was sunk. News Headline: Author Lost Somewhere in Heartland, Found Clutching Electronic Brick.
Yes, it's time for a phone upgrade. If I ever leave my house again, that is.
I'm a pretty early adopter of technologies, but for some reason I'm a Luddite about phones. I hate it when my land-line rings; it will almost never be someone I want to talk to, except when it's my mom or my mother-in-law, who believe that cell phones are something you take in your car, switched off, in case of emergency. Oh my glob, is this the category I'm in?
I've shut off the web function of my phone and my kids' phones (they're on the same plan with me). I mean, seriously, we were getting charged $1.99 every time we accidentally hit the Internet button, and there's not much you can do online with a 1.5-inch screen anyway.
The sound quality of the speaker and microphone are really awful, probably because I once dropped the phone in the toilet and it gets coated twice a week in clay grit from the tennis courts. So I use my cell phone almost exclusively to exchange texts with family and friends. But for texting, my "dumb" phone is relentlessly adequate: it has a qwerty keyboard, and it takes (marginally acceptable) photos, like this one of my daughter's cake pops, which I had to show to my son in L.A.:
Hmm, the photo is a bit fuzzy, isn't it?On the tour, however, my fellow authors were updating our activities on Twitter in real time, while I was checking in, totally exhausted at the end of a long day, on the hotel Internet. All three of them were able to keep up with their e-mail during the down-time at airports. Lish showed me adorable photos of her little boy on her iPhone—crisp photos.
And then there's the small matter of finding one's way around while traveling. I had to map out a jogging route in each city that looked 1. about the right distance, and 2. safe. I had to do this ahead of time from the hotel, and if I got lost on the way I was sunk. News Headline: Author Lost Somewhere in Heartland, Found Clutching Electronic Brick.
Yes, it's time for a phone upgrade. If I ever leave my house again, that is.
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