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My First Smartphone

Gather 'round the Microsoft Surface kiddos, let me tell you of the near dilema that drove me to getting a smartphone.

Yes, we didn't always have our mini supercomputers hiding in our pockets, stretching the back of our necks, getting broken in some stupid way, or distracting us for hours on end.

We had a dedicated device that was a smartphone. No real internet, some actually had some means of email and web access, but they were clunky and I had never set it up. I could only call and text. Ok, and there were a few games, but I could do that better on my TI-83+ back in highschool.

One day, on the way home from a normal day of work (that ended at the shop) I was maybe 15 minutes away when my boss called offering some overtime. Of course, being a money hungry apprentice, I said sure! All I had to do was grab the pickup hitch the temp light generator (the kind you see on the side of highways sometimes) and start driving to a particular store in New Jersey, he'd get me the address in about 30 minutes.

So I turn around, get everything set up and I start heading in the direction I knew I had to go. I don't recall the town/city I had to go to, but I put the generic town into my garmin gps. See? We didn't have a GPS on the phone, we still had our ways even still, we had means of navigation before gps: maps and atlas'! They're still around, but that's more for another story or article.

I was trying to get the boss to get me the address by the time I was about 30 minutes out from my precieved destination, eventually he said he would email me. As I said before, I didn't get email on the phone. It was pulling teeth trying to get him to at least text it to me, which he finally did. I re-set the destionation on the GPS, which recalculated to the next exit which I would have missed otherwise. I got to the store, set up the temp light up at the failed site pole, showed the store manager how to turn it on and left.

I managed about 5 hours of overtime, and with the wonderful expected traffic on the way home I had time to think, and determined that I needed to get one of these newfangled smartphones. They seemed cool, but it also meant I would have to start paying for data. I decided it was worth it.

My parents had covered the phone bill via a family plan with unlimited talk and texting via Verizon. The service was mostly good, but as data wasn't part of the plan, we had to hash it out. The call and text family plan was cheap, the data wasn't as cheap (of course). I would pay for the extra cost and any overages. Perfect, now to get a phone!

I had visited a college friend a few months back, and I vividly remember oodling over his phone and the game he also enjoyed playing on it: Ingress. It was a Samsung Galaxy S4. By todays standards, it wasn't that great. For a first smartphone after 2010, yeah, it was great! It did what I needed it to do. I did manage to make the best phone philisophical choice when I got it: I bought it outright, and I bought a good case. Phone payments are stupid, and regardless of payment or not, you might as well protect it.

While reading this and checking old phone specs, I realized the phone that I had in mind wasn't what I thought it was, but the funny thing is that it was a similar story to when I replaced the S4. The same friend had a new phone, bigger screen, better resolution, etc. Of course, it's a more modern phone. That being the Google Nexus 6P. This phone rocked! Despite being made by Huaweii. I belive the Nexus line for Google was the right direction for Google. Google has seemed to struggle with producing good hardware for their phones. While I've since been using their Pixel phones, I feel that the camera on the 6P was years ahead of the Pixel 5 that I use today. I will get around to linking some comparison pictures in the future, accompanied with a gemlog likely ranting about how that companies can't seem to do things right anymore.

Anyway, that was my delve into smart devices. I'm still there, but more concious of what goes on behind the scenes. One more thing I want to proudly say is that I've yet to break a screen. Perhaps I'll share some secrets to that in a gemlog as well.

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