I May Have Been the Last Hold-out.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My husband is having a spat with his, for want of a better description, sister.
She isn’t actually related. She has been a live-in caregiver for his parents for several years. He has known her since high school.

I don’t really know what the fight is about, but its something said or done on the internet, and or cell phones.
He’s been on her cell phone plan for years. It worked for me because I’m just not so important that anyone needs to reach me NOW!

But that all ended today. This afternoon we spent nearly 4 hours in Best Buy. We are now an AT&T family. They are, of course, iPhones. We used only Apple products since 1994, so, why change now.

He has wanted me to have one for a while now, but I just don’t get it. I have a computer, I don’t need to do the same stuff I do on a 21" screen on an itty bitty screen. My eyes are old.
For that matter, I have a phone. It stays at home, where it belongs. It doesn’t wake me in the middle of the night, unless it’s an emergency, again, as it should be. But, his does. It buzzes and belches with reminders and updates that I know I’ve gotten by without.

I promise, I will keep it charged and take it with me when I go out, but, I can tell you now, it won’t ring, except to tell me to do something that entails more work for me.

They go through this a couple times a year. In a week or so, they’ll kiss and make up and I’ll be stuck with this piece of Pb, and the bill.

Being old is no longer an excuse.

2

You’re not the last holdout. I don’t carry one, and I never will.

3

Yeah I catch hell all the time about my phone. It’s dead most of the time and buried so deep in my purse that even when it’s charged, I never hear it ring. But it almost never rings.

My husband just got his first smart phone last weekend. He resisted too.

4

What? You mean this thing works as a phone too?! I just thought it was my e-mail/GPS/portable games unit/Internet connectivity device/shopping list/personal assistant!

(Seriously, I make maybe a call or two a month on it.)

5

Not to play Can-You-Top-This, but my husband is about to trade his smartphone for a basic flip-phone. He’s been retired a year we dropped our data plan and went to go-phone plans last summer. The main reason he’s kept his Android is that the bluetooth works in the car for hands-free phone. The new flip phone will do the same thing.

I’ve always had a basic phone - when I still worked, it lived in my car. Now it’s usually in a little pocket in my purse where it tends to get jammed in place. I’ve had it go totally dead on me several times. I only want it for emergencies, and so far, I’ve not had one. I may just get rid of it.

6

A smartphone is worth having for its GPS alone. I love seeing an address in my phone’s browser, tapping it and knowing how long it will take to get there, along with turn by turn directions.

ETA: I’ve also recently put all my loyalty cards onto my phone. I use the app Beep-n-Go.

7

Not quite the last hold out, I still don’t have a smart phone and don’t plan to have one in future!

8

Absolutely. I use my smartphone a lot - just rarely as a phone.

9

Another hold-out here. My phone is still a stupidphone.

10

And another. My phone is over a decade old, in the good old “Kirk to Enterprise” style. It will make calls and text. I get about 20 minutes of talk time unless I’m plugged in to the charger. I’d like a smart phone eventually, just haven’t gotten around to trying to sort through all the different phones and plans yet.

11

Count me in with the dumb phones as well. Ok, current phone does have internet connectivity but is not a “smart” phone, thus I rarely ever use it for other than talk or text. This week, however, I upped the data plan a bit to do a couple things I was afraid would end up with me havin’ data charges on my next bill if I didn’t. I backed up the contact lists for the squeeze and myself to the ATT “Locker” which is their version of the cloud. Lesson learned after the squeeze dropped his phone in <snerk> the toilet <snerk> (yes it did bring out my inner twelve year old boy, I have snerked for the past four days), and I had to recreate his contact list. Now our contacts live in the ethernet for future needs.

Welcome to the 21st Century!

12

One point. The newest iPhone, the iPhone 6, is expected to be released in September. So had you waited, you could have had the newest model. I doubt any improvement will be so great that you’ll wish you waited. (In fact I’m still using an iPhone 4S because I didn’t see any compelling improvement in the iPhone 5 or 5S.) But some people like to have the latest technology.

13

Duplicate post.

14

True every day of every year in this era. It was called “six month syndrome” over 25 years ago.

15

Well, it’s more so when the new phone is expected next month and she is almost certainly getting the new phone under a contract. Meaning that whatever phone she has, she will continue to be paying for, for two years.

16

Have 'droid now, will trade up to iPhone when I leave rehab.

17

And another one. I almost never use my dumbphone. If I had a smartphone I’d use it all the time as a pocket-portable computer, but not so much as a phone. I’d get an iPhone, but I’m too cheap to pay for the data plan. My dumphone costs about $50/month (no data, no texting). That comes out to about $50 per phone call. I’d be better off with the same phone on a TracFone plan.

18

Look for the “Do Not Disturb” function in Settings. You can tell it to never do those things between certain hours.

19

Me too. I don’t have one.

20

Ditto. I carry a dumb flip-phone and an iPod Touch. The phone hardly ever gets used, it’s mostly for emergencies. I’m almost always in range of a WiFi network, so the iPod gives me the email, etc., without having to pay for a data plan.