Friday 10 July 2015

Not using a smartphone (sort of)


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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