Sometime ago I wrote
about not
using a smartphone.
Well we took the
Asha on our recent European trip, with a Go-Sim travel SIM to save us
having to buy (and toss) multiple SIMS.
All in all it was a
success. Great for making calls, great battery life. And when you're
travelling, making calls is what you do – call taxis, call hotels
and restaurants to say you're stuck in traffic, and the rest. And
when it came to sending texts the Blackberry type keyboard was faster
and more accurate than the usual glass smartphone keyboard.
And it did the job
wonderfully.
The calls worked out
pretty cheap as well – out of the $30 credit we started out with we
came back with just under $20 credit.
There is of course a
caveat – almost everywhere we went there was free zippy wi-fi,
which meant I could use my tablet for google maps, we could look
stuff up, check the weather, send tweets and emails. This of course
meant carrying two devices, sometimes three, but given that we
usually had a backpack for extra jumpers, rainjackets and so on this
wasn't a big ask.
Now that of course
is not quite the same as real life. But given that increasingly I
take a tablet everywhere as a note taker one has to ask whether or
not one needs a smartphone as well, and I have to say it's only the
convenience factor.
If my current phone
was to die, I could certainly live with the Asha while I sorted out a
replacement, and to be honest, if your life revolved around phone
calls and texts, I'd pick the Asha over a smart phone for one simple
reason – battery life, three or four days without a recharge is
pretty remarkable these days ...
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