I surrender to the Borg....

Well, today (Tuesday) Connie and I went to the local Best Buy store, and found that Verizon was offering a real deal on the Samsung Galaxy S8+. $300 off of the regular price. I had been reading up on the front runners for IOS (Apple) and Android phones and the new Galaxy phone has gotten glowing reviews.

The guys there couldn't believe the old flip phone we had, and were too young to have ever seen the old plan we had with Verizon.

So I have to charge up the phone fully so I can take a look at options and play with it a bit. I can see where these is going to be a sharp learning curve here. Sort of made me change my perception of all the people I see staring intently at their smart phone constantly. Perhaps they are just trying to figure the darn things out.

And I learned something (partially) new too. This cell phone (and I assume others) can be charged up wirelessly just by laying it on a sort of paddle thingie. No direct contacts, or plug ins. It's just like laying the cell phone on a dish and it somehow draws power from it. I have to look this up to see how that works. Shades of Nikola Tesla magic!

Congrats Rich. I hope you and Connie enjoy your new phone! They really are little computers in your hand. I've had iPhones since they came out (before there was an App Store). I do put mine away when driving and rarely walk around with it out like the kids do, but I certainly have it with me. I've heard great things about the Galaxy S8 and that charging system is so neat. One of the best things is that you always have a camera and a GPS with you. That and unlimited texting is life changing.

(By the way I don't buy into the Apple-Android rivalry. I'm all for people enjoying whichever phone they own.)

My two smart phones have been Galaxies, 3 for the old one and current one is the 7. I've had good luck with them so far.

I can't believe Rich went over to the dark side. Now I may be the only one on the forum with an outdated flip phone. They will have to pry it away from my cold, oh wait. I think that had something to do with handguns. Anyway good luck with the new toys.

I can't believe I'm reading this. Did someone hack into Rich's account?????

Well, I have mixed feelings about this smart phone stuff. One one hand, the Borg seem to be OK to rub elbows with. Kind of handy having a pocket programmable computer. Still only scratching the surface, but the idea of being able to speak into a handheld device and get answers to just about anything is right intriguing. Of course, I haven't tested it much yet to see what sort of limits there are. Could it REALLY tell me what the torque specs are on the starter bolts for a 2002 Corvette engine while I am in the garage in a NEED TO KNOW RIGHT NOW sort of situation?

Seem to be a LOT of freebie apps available, but it seems the strings attached mean being slammed with ads. Of course, I guess anything run by Google would have to be that way. Probably after I get my feet wet learning on the freebie apps, I might just try to replace what I can with paid apps. Of course, I don't know how the pricing structure works. Prices seem cheap enough, but is that a one time purchase, or are they what I would have to pay each month? I've stopped buying PC software from vendors who just want to lease you their software products instead of you BUYING them outright.

One thing I do know.... No way in hell I would want to do much of anything on the internet on something like this. I logged into FaunaClassifieds and just tried viewing some classified ads, and that was actually painful to do. Expanding and shrinking the screen constantly, scrolling just to read the text or view a picture CONSTANTLY is WAY too much work. I'll stick with my 4K 28 inch screen and full sized keyboard on my desktop computer, thank you very much. If I HAD to do much of the stuff I do on a daily basis on my sites only using a smart phone, I would be out of and over this stuff in a hurry. Heck, I have small hands and fingers, and trying to tap out even the most basic stuff to post a message is cruel and unusual punishment. I found a stylus I had laying around and find it much easier to "type" that way. Why anyone would put themselves through that day in and day out is beyond me. It just makes the internet actually painful to use.

I do like being able to see weather radar on the fly, and the GPS topo maps look like they could be useful when on trips. Then there is a tool package I installed that has some pretty nifty stuff. The ability to make the smart phone effectively into a magnifying glass is neat. One of the tools is a metal detector, so I'm curious to see how that one works. Also a heart rate monitor, compass, etc.. And yeah, it is kind of cool to be able to take photos and 4K video on the fly with this phone. But I really can't see it taking the place of my photo and video gear for serious shooting. This would be for times when I DON'T have camera gear with me, and something photo worthy just happens to come along. This would be WAY better than nothing in a situation like that.

But yeah, when I take trips, I am STILL going to be taking my laptop with me. This smart phone makes a pretty interesting tool for a lot of things, but I just cannot see it ever taking the place of my main desktop and laptop computers. Even though the computing power should be sufficient, the user interface itself is severely lacking.

So, I guess I am not fully assimilated into the Borg culture yet. This could go one of two ways, I guess. (1) I become absorbed in this technology as I find more and more practical things to use it for, or (2) The newness of a new fangled device enthralls me for a little while, but eventually the novelty will wear off, and it becomes "just a phone with other benefits" to me. Even as a phone, I sure as heck don't want anyone calling me unless I am at home without a darn good reason.

Oh yeah, Connie wants her own phone. So I guess we will be buying another one pretty shortly. Normally she just takes the cell phone we had with her when she makes trips when we are not together. But she worries about me being without one when I am here alone and driving on the roads anywhere. I sincerely doubt she will ever get much involved with a smart phone, however. She just doesn't care much for anything of a technical nature.

There is a learning curve and just like any computer it needs to serve you and not the other way round. In the end it's just a tool.

Give Connie my best on her new phone.

While I don't want or need a smart phone, it seems that everyone who has one does like the thing. I'll tell you how far out of touch I am. My daughter-in-law asked if we could babysit our 18 month old granddaughter, and I said bring her over. She said if the baby gets bored here's a smart phone, just give it to her. I assumed it was broken and the baby would just throw it around. No way, she turned it on and selected some app that brought up Mother Goose Club. Her tiny fingers scrolled through all the songs and she selected the ones she wanted to watch. Holy mackerel, an 18 month old knows more about a smart phone than I do. Sue told me to turn off the phone so she could feed the baby, but I said I don't know how you turn it off. I finally convinced the baby to turn it off by telling her I have ice cream.

I don't know if I'm also too old to have fully assimilated, I only got a smart phone in 2012, but yeah, there are quite a few things that are actively painful to attempt on a phone and I've always had decent (for a phone) sized screens. There is no way that I would be able to do without a PC of some kind.

I do love the GPS feature though!

So Friday Connie and I went back up to Best Buy to see if we could get another phone while it is still on sale. Yep! So now Connie has her own phone too.

This makes it kind of tough, because I usually have to help her figure out technical stuff, and I'm a newbie with this stuff too, and floundering to come up with answers when she asks. I still haven't figured out how to rearrange the icons on the screen to move the ones I will actually ever use to the front, and the other ones to the back. Or heck, perhaps I could just create folders to put the really arcane icons out of sight completely? I already deleted the games that are preloaded on the phone, as I can't see me ever playing games. After playing games on my desktop, I can't see where playing games on a little phone is going to have much attraction for me.

I had downloaded some ringtones and figured out how to get them from my PC to the phones, and had Connie pick out something she would like. She found one that was OK, but she really wanted something better. I had to pry out of her what she had in mind, and she said she really likes the into to the song "Key Largo". So I spent some time last night creating a custom ringtone for her from that song. Would have gone a LOT quicker if the utilities I had would have been able to download the music file from YouTube. I finally did find one video I could download, but all the rest of them just would not work. Extracting the intro and editing it a bit was a snap after I got the raw file.

Oh, the ringtone I picked cracked me up when I first heard it. It starts with the oldtime bell ringer, and then some Pakistani sounding guy starts talking about "pick up the phone, please". It will probably get old after a while, but for now it's worth a laugh when I hear it.

So looks like today Connie is going to be calling members of her family to give them her new phone number and also have their phone numbers stored on her new phone. I showed her how to edit them as contacts to make them easier to find. I know she is going to be hoping that someone calls her so she can hear her ringtone.

I'm waiting for a case to come in that I ordered. We bought a sort of wallet style case for mine when I bought it, but Connie really likes that one, so I gave it to her. I'm thinking I want one with a belt clip so it will be easy to carry around when we are hiking in the woods, or riding the trails on our bikes. Not that I am expecting, or wanting, any phone calls, but accidents can happen.... I will tell you what, these things without a case are as slippery as gravy on a doorknob. No wonder people drop and break them. I also put screen protectors on the front of both phones. I'll be honest, seeing fingerprints, smudges and streaks on the shiny surfaces of the phones really drives both of us nuts.

Oh, I found a nifty little app that supposedly lets you GPS track another phone via the phone number. Connie is planning on visiting family soon, so I thought it kind of cool to be able to track her progress as she drives up north. I passed this by her first, of course. We figure the government already can use these things to track everyone anyway, so this just allows us to tap into that capability. Of course, our limited app requires that the same app be on each phone we would want to track, but I'm sure the government doesn't have any such limitation.

So when do I get that cool metallic exoskeleton on my body of the Borg?