Could you Survive 2 weeks without a SmartPhone?

From the looks and messages from people, I would think that it was impossible for some of you to live without your phones.

Imagine you had to revert back to a Blackberry Bold or Curve, I used both but more on that in a minute, could you do it? Sure for a day or 2 maybe but 2 weeks?

The problem started the day before we left for vacation to Israel, the Thursday of Thanksgiving. I dropped my HTC Vivid Android phone and it landed smack on a rock and shattered the glass. Yeah that sucked, but it was still useful, so I made do on our trip.

Either while away or shortly after we returned I ordered a new digitizer off of eBay. When that came in, I proceeded to replace my glass and put it all back together. Powered it on and saw a line cracked and just a shade of red or blue or green and nothing else. Yes, I had damaged the LCD at some step along the way. Back to eBay. Ordered a new LCD which came today.

Took it all apart, replaced the LCD and put it back together and happy to say it is good to go again.

I learned a lot about how I work and how useful or useless a smartphone is to me.

The BB Curve was the slower device I had laying around which is unlocked and I could get all my emails but web browsing was useless and apps were iffy. My friend Paul gave me his old BB Bold which was MUCH faster but still locked down by a BES and so I only had phone service. I decided I would learn to live with my office's iPad but use the BB Bold because at least the browser worked efficiently.

I now know that the Bold had a crappy keyboard with the weird left/right slanted keys, but since I rarely used a BB over the years, despite managing numerous BES environments, I figured I could live with this. But now I was a 3 device person, including the laptop. When my phone is working, I rarely need to use the iPad. I prefer typing on my phone over the iPad.

The iPad, while an excellent reader device, really is lacking in keyboard intelligence or ease of use. In this day and age of alpha-numeric passwords is it so much to ask apple to let me just hold a key down to get to the alternate key or number? Or to hold it down to get a capital letter? My old Nokia phones always did this and that was in 1999.

It is nice to keep so many screens open on an iPad and the battery life is awesome, shame it is such a PITA to type. I could never type this blog post on it without a bluetooth keyboard. But I could go 2-3 days without needing to recharge it.

I did not exactly survive 2 weeks without my phone because I had the iPad by proxy. But my postings or photos from the holidays and trips were limiting and that was a shame. The iPad has a lousy still camera option. It could record sound and video but not great quality. I missed the simplicity of opening one of many apps and take photo and post it. I did not miss seeing my email, not one bit. I did miss my contacts and phone numbers but that also was interesting. I had few calls, thanks to the holidays, and did not need to call too many people either.

So I went semi-cold turkey on social media and came out of it with an interest to do more and looking forward to this year.

For everyone that wondered where I was or why I replied in short or cryptic ways the last 2 weeks, now you know the reason.