collection of symbols from a smart phone
Creativity Hardware

A Phone’s short story

I was born smart, told that I’m a compact mobile computer for people with busy lives. How great is that?

Most of what I do is with radios, sending and receiving; although the camera and all the other things I do runs down my battery quite quickly, especially after a lot of chatting, and more so with making videos.

Sending and receiving all of the time, the brain is whirring away looking after things. So, my built in battery (why is it built in?) lasts so long and it likes a top up now and again, like a dog that has been for a good walk then needs a drink. Some of my not-so-smart phone cousins, they are Feature Phones; only doing some of what I do, taunting me about how they can keep working after their owner had a lot of chatting in a week with one charge. I think they’re winding me up.

Some times I do wish I was clockwork and had a wind up mechanism like my cousin the clockwork radio. Heh, I like to remind them that I send information, not just listening! My user gets to have a chat too.

All in all its not bad being useful, but being screen punched by a finger is not nice – being gentle or using a ‘screen pen’ can make my life easier and my user gets to work with me better. Speaking of which, my user is asking for a bus timetable and the weather report for tomorrow…What no wifi?

Surely my user has data from the mobile network – that’s a good second best..uhoh. Its a Pay As You Go, so no top up, no internet. Seem to be topped up so much more lately, it should be called Pain As You Go, because my user really likes those kitten videos on Youtube which suck up a lot of internet data.

Its much easier on the data to just get the weather and bus time table, but over the time my user has had me, things have moved on; starting with the occasional tweet, messages, phone calls and details on the weather/bus. Then the Tik Tok, then the Youtube..get quite hot with all the work, sucking in all that extra data which doesn’t go far on PAYG. Its easier to present videos and such when there is a friendly wifi or at home. Out and about is just fine for the small stuff, like web pages and apps asking for information.

Yup, still no wifi? So turn off the wifi, save my battery please. What else can we do..oh we’re going for a walk instead of the bus. I’ve got some other tricks to entertain my user for the walk; the bluetooth radio can be used for headphones (or a speaker) to listen to music, have a handsfree chat. Yes, it takes up battery; I wish my user would turn it off when its not needed.

Okay, we’ve gone to a coffee shop, they have wifi – hope my user doesn’t see the ‘FREE WIFI HERE’ option that came up when we about the other day, that was weird: no sign up web page, no password. Lots of ads and it was a rubbish speed too; complete jokers. These jokers could have a look at the kitten videos too, but its not nice and really nosy.