Deserted Island: Phone or Computer?

I made it to age 26 without a phone. Enjoyed not being reachable, you know? Eventually I got one and in no time it became an obsession just like that. I mean look at me, I’m blogging about phone addiction with two phones next to my arms. And a battery tester tester to the left of that, couple standalone cell phone battery chargers in front of the keyboard – I’m a mess.

Seems silly that it’s called a phone given for most of you, that like me, over 85% of your milliamp hours are spent on non-phone activities like RSS, email, calendar and to do lists, your other email accounts, trying new widgets, downloading alternative browsers, checking how much more CPU is being eaten up by live wallpaper, backing data up, navigating, music, camera, gallery, watching movies, making movies, posting an article to your blog, viewing your blog to see if it looks right on phones, bringing up your office computer’s desktop remotely, producing a wifi network as needed, updating apps, editing a document you had stored in the cloud and remotely printing it, installing an app to uninstall other apps quickly, file management, social stuff, monitoring your server through SSH, calculating Pi for benchmark racing, wasting time, wasting money and checking to make sure your card will go through at the end of your Valentine’s Day dinner in case she doesn’t insist on paying like a modern woman ought to.

And every now and then a phone call.

I start my morning with a ton of coffee and a ritual of tab cleansing on my computer to free up my ram, and today I went on my phone and deleted extraneous apps after which I noticed that the count of remaining apps I had installed and like and use enough not to delete them is 97. Pulled up the control panel on my computer to see how they compared, 33 programs (not counting all the update crap, just programs I’ve used at least once). Three times as many apps on my phone. Given that you’re on a site about phones now, I bet the same is true for almost all of you, that you have more if not significantly more programs you installed yourself on purpose on your phone than on a computer.

So, returning to the title….

Doug Simmons