Well, it seems as tho my old Droid4 is finally crapping out. I liked it for the tactile keyboard, but imagine I’ll need to give that up.
The ONLY things I like to do w/ my phone are make and receive calls/texts, and a VERY occasional search for a map or something. And some pictures (which I tend to never look at again.) Anything I can wait to do on my home computer, I wait. I guess I COULD imagine putting music on it, but not much.
To give you an idea of how heavily I use my phone, I have a total of 1 app on my current phone. The main reason I don’t have a flip phone is for ease of texting.
Is your wife or family in the market for a new phone? If so, offer to take the old one off their hands. That might be the cheapest way to acquire a phone. (That’s how my mother gets new phones; she inherits my old ones as I upgrade them.)
Since your needs are incredibly minimal, get the cheapest thing you can find. I used one of these for a while between better phones when one broke. Ten bucks, it’ll do everything you described. Want to splurge and spend 6 times as much? The new Samsung Galaxy A10e seems pretty nice for the price.
We currently have Verizon. My wife suggested I could have her old Apple if she wanted to upgrade.
The main thing I want is dependability and (hopefully) durability. But I suppose I should view it as a disposable and get the cheapest and replace it every couple of years.
LOL. My advice to everyone in my life is to spend as much as you can because there is nothing else in your life that you touch more than your phone. It’s your internet connection, your music playing device, your radio, your video game controller, your communication device, etc.
But… in your case, get a used Apple phone. Probably a 6 in your case. Get a screen protector and a good case. That should be very cheap and do everything you need.
Yeah unfortunately you aren’t going to find many/any phones with a physical keyboard any more. How important is a removable battery to you? Because most phones don’t have one now, which tends to limit their lifespan.
As a former die-hard Droid fan (used my Droid 4 to death, then used a Droid Turbo to death before my current phone) I have been quite pleased with the Google Pixel 3.
Obviously my phone use is much heavier than yours, so switching to Apple might be okay for you, but I find that the Apple interface tends to just piss me off.
I may have attained a new level WRT how little I care for/about my cellphone. My battery has been crapping out for some time - despite having been replaced. But I’m able to limp along w/ liberal use of chargers. A single internet search will pretty much kill it, but fine, I can easily do without that.
What bothered me the other day was when I was trying to pick my son up at the airport on Thanksgiving, and I did not receive their texts. But since then, texts have worked fine. I’m leaning towards convincing myself that it was a holiday system-wide glitch, and/or my phone healed itself. Mainly, I’m just eager to find an excuse to avoid having to decide which phone to get, and having to figure out a different interface.
I’d be cautious of assuming that you wouldn’t use a new phone more than your current one; I thought the same thing (I had a flip-phone until about 2014), but was surprised to find out how handy the thing was, once I finally got a smartphone.
I’ll add a +1 to the idea that you should upgrade your wife’s phone and just use her old one, with one caveat which is that you probably want one that’s still being supported by Apple, so a 6s or newer. If you do start using it more, having your wife and yourself on the same platform will ease a lot of things.
Thanks. Yeah, I had assumed similarly. When I belatedly got my current smart phone however many years ago, I remember my kids/nieces/nephews mocking me when I googled things saying I was gonna be “THAT guy!”
But the novelty quickly wore off. I’m just not interested in a lot of the digital world, and I really dislike the small phone screen. I’m the kinda neaderthal who still likes paper maps, or looking up instructions before I hit the road. I read books ad magazines, rather than using an e-reader.
Then I have the problem that, since I use the phone relatively infrequently, I do not retain how to do specific things. I’m perfectly happy w/ my analog pastimes - reading dead trees, gardening, making music with people in person, walking my dog - that I’m not eager to spend more time learning this tech. Not saying anything wrong w/ people feeling otherwise - apparently most do.
An Apple phone would have a benefit of synching up w/ my iMac - in terms of saving photos, and managing music. Not sure how much $ that is worth to me…
There are a couple of areas where it’s come in extraordinarily handy that I wouldn’t have guessed when I got it.
First, taking photos of the nameplate/serial number/model number of items I’ve bought is really handy- you always have them with you. Second, having the ability to actually download and keep the instruction manuals for devices with you is amazingly handy as well, especially if you got something secondhand or have lost the original manual.
Also, the calendaring/alarm functionality is very handy if you have stuff going on- you can integrate it with your navigation/maps as well, so that it’ll basically note that you have an upcoming appointment across town, and then track traffic conditions, etc… such that it’ll tell you when you need to leave to be there on time.
There’s a lot of neat stuff out there that phones didn’t used to do, especially with some of the newer offerings stores have. For example, if you want to do that Walmart pickup thing, they have a nifty app that you can order your stuff, tell them when yo want to pick it up, and it’ll actually recognize when you arrive via location services to have them come out and bring you your stuff.
