I echo some of her comments and am guilty of it myself. My daughter is completely addicted and I wonder how this has been affected by her parents behaviour
I do find it somewhat dismaying when I am in a some sort of social situation (remember them?) and often everybody is on their phones rather than talking to each other. Probably more the case with younger people but we are letting ourselves down and the future consequences could be pretty brutal.
I don’t yet have a smartphone. I have a decade-old Samsung with a screen the size of a postage stamp. I charge it up every two weeks, whether it needs it or not.
My logic being (a) at home I’m not usually far away from a computer (b) I have Sat Nav in the car (c) when I’m out, I don’t want to be looking at the internet (d) if anybody needs me, they can call or text.
I do have a smartphone provided by my employer, which is always connected to the charger and lives under the monitor in the dining room (aka my WFH office). I never look at it outside of office hours. I average two calls a month (all the rest being on Teams).
I hear rumours the 3G network is going to be switched off in the next year or two, though.
I checked, BT say they are going to turn off their 3G network “by 2023” so I might have less than a year left. I only got coverage at home a couple of years ago, when they installed an aerial above the CoOp.
@fentonsteve
“An aerial above the co-op”
Possible get out for Boris Johnson there
Was that just after a street’s belief in Sunday’s roast beef was dashed against it?
I had a very old Nokia for years and steadfastly refused to be tempted by a smartphone. Mrs Bone got fed up with my technophobia in the end and gave me her old smartphone. I now have an iPhone 12 and an iPad Pro. I wouldn’t be without either, but I’m not tempted to spend hours in vacuous use of social media – I don’t have a Twitter account and don’t follow anyone famous on Facebook or Instagram. Smartphones are a wonderful invention and a fabulous tool – the key must surely be to use them as such, and not as a replacement means of engaging with the world. That’s what the Afterword is for. Er….
Hate mobiles with a passion and only very reluctantly got one when i set up as a
Freelancer in 2000.
I like smartphones even less. Aside from their addictiveness, probably the worst thing about them is the way people like my brother-in-law use them to fire up Google and nitpick every conversation to death with petty clarifications
@jaygee
That’s wikimansplaining – the now-viral catch-all name for this phenomenon, invented by me. Check it out :
Excellent piece, @Black-Celebration.
Only change I would suggest would be to change the name to wikipedophiles.
The really horrible thing about this sort of fucktard is how their uninvited, unwanted and uninformed interjections bring otherwise interesting conversations to a dead halt (“Sorry, J, but I think you’ll find that far from being the first on the scene at Eddie Cochran’s fatal accident, Dave Dee was only AMONG the first people to arrive”. being one of my BiL Reg’s recent zingers.
I have a BIL who is exactly the same. Convivial family setting, nice bit if chatter going on. BIL completely silent except for authoritative interjections exactly like the one described above. It’s as if he, and he alone, is capable of googling something.
Wow. I have no recollection of contributing to that thread at all. I think my declaration that I’m on the side of “Team Pedant” is maybe going to haunt me. But I know what I meant!
EDIT. Just reading back my conversation on that thread with JustB and it’s unintentionally hilarious. After me saying I quite like pedantry and that I think it is linked to introversion, JustB then pedantically picks me up on my misdefinition of what an “introvert” is…. 🙂
It isn’t pedantry if it’s core to the discussion. It’s just correction.
Absolutely.
Everybody knows that Dave Dee wasn’t present at the scene of the accident at all. He wasn’t called that at the time.
Tcoh!
I have a Smartphone, but rarely use it as a SMART phone – I still use it to make phone calls (surely not!) – no landline anymore (or at least no handset connected to it)
Actually, I do use it for: Facebook, Afterword, Amazon (to remind me whats on the Wish List when wandering record shops), and Football.
WhatsApp? WhatsThat
You can still buy little Nokia non-smart phones. (I can’t see a model number on mine, so not sure what it is). I use it for calls and texts. It also has Snake! I like it because it is tiny and light and I only ever need to charge it about twice a month, if even that.
But I usually have a smartphone as well. I always inherit my wife’s cast-off when she upgrades. But the big difference being I don’t actually put a sim in it or buy any data. So it’s an Internet browsing device that I keep handy whenever I am at home or perhaps somewhere with wi fi. But because I don’t have data everywhere I’m not tempted to be always browsing. I’m not really into a Facebook addict anyway, and not on twitter.
Without a smartphone, what am I supposed to do at work?
Work?
Am I the only AW regular who has never had a mobile phone?
Don’t blame you, C.
They’re a handheld tenth circle of hell
I very reluctantly got one about 20 years ago because I would be put on the guest list for gigs (to do the Merch table) but I’d turn up and arsey promoters would refuse to let me in. So I’d have to find the nearest phone box and call the performer from his backstage boudoir to come and let me in.
I barely receive any calls on mine, even fewer than my landline (mostly from scammers). I put £30 pay-as-you-go credit on and it lasts me years. The handset cost me £12.99 about 10 years ago.
It’s really very simple: more money on smartphone = less money for records.
What’s a landline?
It is, as my teenage kids would say, the box on the wall the WiFi router plugs into.
Fiio don’t make a mobile phone? I am shock.
Sadly not. The fact I have a Fiio (well, more than one, truth be told) probably partially explains why I still have a 3G phone.
Current Fiio players run Android, making them essentially Smartphones without the ability to make calls.
No, you’re not, @Colin-H!
I stubbornly refuse to get one, but they make it more and more difficult to be without one. I’m planning to hold out as long as possible, and I’ve noticed in later years that people express envy more often when I tell them – ten or even five years ago people just looked at me like I was a freak! (Which I am, but for other reasons…)
I sometimes use a defunct work phone of Mrs H’s to film clips at gig / take pics – but it doesn’t work as a phone, it’s really just a camera. The one compromise I’ve had to make is to use a relative’s mobile telephone when setting up new online banking payees and when the online banking system insists on sending a temporary code to a mobile phone even for transfers to existing payees – there’s just no other way to do it bar, in the former instance, setting up a new payee via a call to the bank (which takes a ridiculous amount of time). I’ve complained to the bank that this system disenfranchises those customers without such gadgets, and who choose not to have them (but who can be contacted by email, Facebook, LinkedIn, landline, pigeon…). But it does no good.
Thankfully the Swedish online bank system works differently, so I can easily do everything from my computer and no mobile needed.
But plenty of other services that no longer cater to mobile-free households. Still, if they don’t want my business, I can take it elsewhere – for now. It’s when all businesses require mobile/smart phones that I’m dreading.
I’m not anti tech and I don’t mind other people using mobile phones, I just hate being forced to use something that I have no need for, unless they create that need, so they do; I still don’t want it.
It’s a ridiculous state of affairs that temporary codes can only be sent by text, instead of, by customer choice, to a registered email address. Just lazy thoughtlessness on their part.
I do have a smartphone. Mainly as a more convenient substitute for a camera.
I do use it for calls and texts but I don’t use it very much for anything else.
I have a minimal PAYG SIM-only account with O2. I pay £12.49 a month for unlimited calls and texts and far more data than I’ve ever come close to using so far. I don’t spend my time playing games, gawping at movies or YouTube clips etc.on it. Most of the time it’s in my pocket. I might occasionally go to Wikipedia to find out about something I’ve got curious about, away from home.
Hmm…in Sweden we get our temporary codes through a small device given to us by our bank. You stick your bank card into the device, press a log in or sign button and enter a temporary code given to you by the online bank site + your card PIN, and the device then generate a new temporary code for you to use to sign or log in, or buy etc, quick and easy and the device comes with the account when you open one in any bank. Is that not a thing anywhere else?
Yes, UK has that too, Barclays at least
HSBC use a similar system in both Hong Kong and the UK, probably elsewhere too
Same here – I never owned or used a mobile phone. Luckily in Germany it’s still possible to use online banking and shopping without one of these things. Even PayPal (with a bit of trickery) can be forced to send their confirmation code as a voicemail to a regular telephone. (My partner has a (quite old) mobile phone that we use on travels for the inevitable on-the-go confirmations with the airline.)
When your office and the working life is full of communication devices it’s quite relaxing to go for a one hour walk without one of these little black boxes in your hand.
Nope, me neither. I have no use for one whatsoever.
This is the new “oh we don’t have a television and if we did we’d only watch nature documentaries” isn’t it?
Yes.
@ip33
Don”t know.
What I do know is that If my brother-in-law was here he’d be Googling some dubious statistics to disprove your claim on his Smartphone
Have you considered that the problem is your brother in law and not smartphones?
Pedants got to pedant and all that.
So while ninth dan black belt nitpickers like my BIL were undoubtedly crashing bores before, they were usually limited to offering their ill-informed insights into topics they knew something about. (trains and buses in Reg’s case)
The arrival of the smartphone meant that the likes of Reg were just a couple of clicks away from being able to deliver “expert” opinions on everything under the sun. Something they insist on doing with monotonous regularity
The internet – empowering everyone – especially arses!
Aged judge “You mentioned something called a ‘smart phone’? Is this a new version of the trim phone?”
Well, I already didn’t have a television, so what am I supposed to do now?
Goodbye Blackberry…………..way
Did you already not have a Smart TV?
Sweet Jesus, even I have a smartphone. It’s amazing. I even believe you can “call” people on it though it’s not something I’ve ever tried
What people?
There are people?
In my mind I’m going to .. you know, that place
I don’t have internet on my smartphone, I use it for calls and texts only. I take it out of my pocket when I’m out and about only to answer calls. To be truthful I fuckin’ hate phones.
I use my laptop, iPad Pro or desktop computer for things such as this.
In early 2007, I was visited at home by a mysterious stranger.
He knocked on the front door at about 3pm on a relatively nondescript Sunday afternoon. Diminutive in stature and luxuriously moustachioed, he looked up at me, a twinkle in his eye and asked for a moment of my time, proffering as he did so a purple business card, the text on which was illegible and seemed to shift before my eyes. Curious, I showed him to the living room, served him warm, sweet tea and settled down onto the sofa alongside him.
In a highly idiosyncratic accent which careened haphazardly and inexplicably between Spanish, cockney and Eastern European, the gentleman informed me that he had been an acquaintance of my maternal grandfather, to whom he had long ago promised that the following conversation would occur.
As I listened, spellbound, he regaled me with tales of his life at sea as a member of the Greater Persian Navy; outlandish and improbable adventures, often conducted in close conjunction with the man I had known as Grandpa Auguste.
The lengthy oration took in sea battles on the Cape of Good Hope, skirmishes with pirates in the Indian Ocean, and, finally, a secret treasure unearthed in the foothills of the Andes, shortly before my grandfather first met my grandmother. A treasure which proceeded to bestow seemingly endless blessings upon my lineage, but which also brought with it a terrifying curse that required the eldest born son of each generation to engage in a seemingly endless struggle with a nameless, shapeless foe who would emerge from dark waters on the last full moon of the calendar year and attempt to devour all that stood its path.
Anyway, that little guy was the first person I ever saw use an iPhone. Loved the touchscreen and the music storage capabilities; I got one myself a few months later and I’ve had one ever since. Funnily enough, we’re still in touch on WhatsApp to this day. Wouldn’t be without my smartphone.
I wrote a list of all the things I use my smartphone for and then decided not to post because it sounded smug. I find it invaluable. Completely invaluable. Especially when I’m sat outside netball training and there’s football on.
Yeah I couldn’t really live without one, but I need to spend less time looking at this screen (on it now of course)
Dull story: in 2003 I designed a mp3 player with a bloke in Cambridge. In 2004 he left to work for Apple in California. He did the electronics for the first few iPhones. He spent about 9 months in the Foxconn factory in China, which wasn’t much fun for his wife, stuck at home in Cupertino.
Better weather than Cambridge though.
With no green card and no social life, and a husband working all the hours, I think she got a bit bored of all that nice weather.
Cupertino? A ‘thank you’ wouldn’t go amiss.
Please yerselves…
Two sugars in mine.
I’m never off mine. I spent years agonising over the ‘negative consequences’ of being constantly online, and then just decided to embrace it instead.
I think there’s a lot of fear-mongering. We got told television would rot our kids’ brains, and we’ve turned alright. Smartphones are no different. The kids who’s parents restrict access to the tech media of the day usually turn out to be the weird ones. Yurt-dwelling social misfits.
I’ve rotted my brain with alcohol and drugs. Why should TV get all the credit?
I don’t go online (much) beyond 8pm, same as I don’t drink caffeinated tea after my dinner (I gave up coffee years ago, but when I did I couldn’t go past 2pm). Insomnia is a constant battle.
I can fall asleep in front of the telly, but not infront of the computer (unlike many people reading this). Odd (dull) that, innit?
Television was generally a social thing though, we watched with our families. People constantly in their own worlds on electronic devices avoiding social interaction is more troubling I think
Yes all that smart phone chat and sharing is not the least bit social. As for television, well I recall much discontent with that long past, immovable arrangement. The youngsters (30ish) I know of, prefer to watch their own TV shows on their own devices, maybe in the same room on the same sofa. Who’s to say they haven’t got it better?
By the ’90s all but the poorest kids had their own TVs in their rooms and (unless they shared with a sibling or had a friend visiting) were watching on their own.
Depends on the household
Damn those mechanical looms!
Luddy hell!
5 year old second hand Samsung Galaxy. Giffgaff for a tenner a month. Working telephone function. Occasional SMS. OK camera. 2FA app for work. CCTV app. App for audiobooks & podcasts via Bluetooth buds. Whatsapp. That’s the lot.
Keep mislaying the thing around the place. Call it from the landline to find out where I left it.
No Farceberk, no Twatter, no Instamug, no Taktak.
I’m not looking for justification. If you’re not into Smartphones or social media that’s cool of course. My comment was aimed at those who think Smartphones are some sort of symbol of the decline in civilisation.
Sorry Vulpes, thought that was a response to me.
Maybe the web has rotted my brain…
We told you, we warned you, but you wouldn’t have it…..
People were blethering on about the decline of civilization in the days of Plautus. It was those modern urns rotting people’s brains.
I proudly used to all that I had no need for a smart phone, as I had already a camera and an i-pod, and, for that matter, a computer. Thus, that I was smarter.
Then I got an i-phone.
I no longer use my i-pod or camera, and magic means everything on my computer is also on my phone.
Love it.
And I love “apps”.
So there.
Luddites can do whatever Luddites do (smash up cotton machinery, Jaygee’s brother-in-law tells me), I don’t care, but me, I love my phone. I’ve just treated myself to a new iPhone 13 Pro, because I decided I was worth it, and I use it for everything you can use a smartphone for, including making phone calls from time to time. Nobody’s mentioned the sheer joy of having an extremely capable camera in your pocket all the time.
This ⬆️
Can I suggest that JGBIL become an oh-so-humourous in-joke for a few months? Extra points for using it in response to people who haven’t seen this thread and therefore don’t know what it means.
JGBIL could become the next Gerry Rafferty (BSHM).
Smartphones are so last year. This is the future. Maybe at last it will have the functionality that enables you to hear a song for the first time again.. (By the way I too love my Smartphone…)
@Dave-Amitri,
Bloody hell, we’re hardly through Christmas and the April Fool’s gags have started!
Oh Elon Musk is involved, it’s got to be totally benign and beneficial!
Wow. Imagine being able to hear a song for the first time again! I would love that.
Or actually, thinking it through…
Imagine wiping a song from your memory then re-listening to it and realising that the awesomeness of the song was greatly exaggerated by your teenage brain, and now you realise the song is nothing special after all. Then imagine the same holds true for EVERY song you loved as a teenager…
God, that’s depressing.
Elon, STOP!! Before it’s too late!!
SO HERE IT IS! MERRY CHRISTMAS! EVERYBODY’S HAVING FUN
*runs screaming into the sea*
I can do this! Occasionally I can somehow get in a zone where I can recall that first impression as I listen today
Paul McKenna claimed on DiD that he could hypnotise himself into hearing a record for the first time. He said he did this with He’s the Greatest Dancer, so he’s got decent taste even if he talks out his bottle.
I can’t do it deliberately but I occasionally get this glimmer of recollection of how it first sounded to me. It is lovely.
This morning, on my endless commute to work, I watched an episode of Inspector Morse on my phone. Any device that allows me to do that is fine by me. If you travel a lot by rail for work, a smartphone is a necessity; it’s great to be able to see if a train is delayed, cancelled or on time (the latter a rarity).
I don’t travel much and so don’t use the phone much. I’m always forgetting it. I left it in a friend’s car not long ago and as she was driving home alone late at night it rang. Totally freaked her out, as my ringtone is the start of Tubular Bells.
Now thats what I can do with my old smartphones. Charge it up, put a freaky horror ringtone on it and leave it round a friends and ring it late at night. Superb!
But how do you monitor the progress of your robot vacuum cleaner? And what about swishing money to your wife to pay for the shopping? Then there’s marking your place at the table in the fika room while you get your food from the fridge? And that’s barely scratching the surface. We don’t really use our computer any more. Well we do but as smart phones. It’s a relief with all the frustrations and complications of a laptop. Tinkering with files and slow software and more. A phone is fine, it just depends what you choose to do with it.
Speaking of robot vacuum cleaners..
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-60084347
That’s not far from where I work. I can’t say I blame it.
….what, for not being far from you? Who would, cheeky?
For wanting to escape Orchard Park. I know that’s how I feel whenever I go there.
It can see (does a robot vacuum cleaner have eyes?) the big skies of the Fens across the A14. The grass is always greener, etc.
In other local news, a woman from St Neots has rowed across the atlantic to Antigua. Cambridgeshire’s biggest market town isn’t that bad, surely? It’s on the East Coast main line, she could have taken the train somewhere nice.
Cutting edge journalism from the Beeb there.
Some welcome relief from the usual relentless doom and gloom of 2022 Britain.
Or maybe it accidentally achieved sentience and the first step in the rise of our robot overlords has been taken. Sentient vacuum cleaners would probably do no worse running things than Boris, Priti, Raab & co.
I was actually very surprised – because when there’s a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, things are normally swept under the carpet.
These types of stories really suck.
Definite parallel with our government there.
Have they already taken over?
Well, Boris and Give have a history of hoovering (TMFTL)
Come on, dy son!
I find it extremely vaxaitous…
An escaping vacuum cleaner?
Henry opens the door.