Upgrading to a Smartphone

Spring in January I Come From a Narcissistic Family

Upgrading to a Smartphone

My poor old dumb phone finally decided it had enough of being at my peck and call, and it quit working. Although I have never wanted a smartphone, that’s what I ended up with, and oh, my. I thought the internet consumed time, but that phone could pretty much eat up my days if I wanted it to.

For starters, it took a long time to find my way around and get it the way I wanted. It’s not that the actions were complicated, but in many cases, it was hard to find the instructions.

One of the things I didn’t like was that all texts ended up in the inbox of one of my online email accounts. Yikes. It wasn’t bad yesterday when I had only a couple of texts, but some family members correspond with me strictly via text, and I had visions of spending hours deleting such items from my inbox. Also, all contacts from certain email accounts ended up as contacts on my phone, and most of those people I’m not close to. I certainly don’t want to be carrying them with me wherever I go.

And then there was Facebook. I downloaded the app, got it all set up, even downloaded the app for Facebook pages, then went to add something on the calendar on my phone and found it flooded with events and birthdays from people on FB I don’t even know. I found a way to empty the calendar, but it immediately filled up again. It wouldn’t be a problem since I have never used ecalendars (I’m not always on the computer when I need to check my schedule), but I thought I’d try the one on the phone. I found no way to unsync all the FB info, so when it turned out to be a choice between FB or the calendar, I chose the calendar. So I uninstalled the FB app. If you’re one of my FB contacts, you won’t be inundated with silly status updates. Aren’t you glad?

I found a cool calculator that works like its unvirtual counterpart, and a colorful game — Blendoku. I have always loved the way colors shade and fade into each other, so the game is a natural for me.

I’m sure there are hundreds of other apps that I would find fascinating — for example, I saw an app that supposedly identifies stars and such in the night sky — but for now, I’m limiting myself. The whole thrust of my current life is to live the real world, not the electronic one (though apparently, the so-called real world is also just a series of electrons connecting us one to another).

Still, I will be using the phone for more than making calls. I just wanted to let you know in advance that any errors in my posts and emails are due to the phone. I, of course, don’t make errors. :-)