Get Smart(Phone), or, The Droid I Was Looking For

I'm a pretty old-fashioned kind of gal.  I like my books in paper form, I like my buildings made of bricks,* and I like my music played on my clock radio CD player that I've had since 2004.  I also really liked my flip phone.  It was a little LG Accolade and it served me beautifully for probably over three years.  It was also fun because it was the same phone that my friends Matt, Ashlee, and Sarah all had.  We were like a little club of archaic phone friends.  

However, like most old things, my phone started to show that it was old.  The inlet where you plug in the charger was loose and you had to jiggle it in order to charge, and when it was charged, it would only stay charged for a day and a half.  The keys were starting to stick so it was hard to make spaces between words in text messages.  Last week it developed something comparable to trigger finger, such that it wouldn't flip open in one motion, but would get stuck halfway and have to be pushed further.  That was when I conceded that it was probably time for a new phone.

I had been contemplating the switch to a smart phone for a ridiculously long time.  Even though I am not super tech-savvy and I don't care for Angry Birds, I saw the merit.  I especially saw the merit when I was lost somewhere and didn't know when or where a bus would stop.  All of these things were minor issues that could not be used to talk me into sifting through an insane amount of options to pick out a phone, however.  The final straw was when my sixty-odd-year-old father, who types in all caps and doesn't know how to use the DVD player got a smart phone for work.  Back broken, I brought myself to the Verizon store and told the guy, "sell me a smart phone, dang it!"**

I decided on a Droid Razr M by Motorola.  All the Verizon store guys cheered me on as I walked out with it (probably because they were sick of me coming in and browsing and hemming and hawing for many weeks prior).  It was cheap and I got a fun purple case for it.  So far the only Apps that I've put on it are the LDS Gospel Library (even though I still lug my heavy hard copy quad to church), an Anatomy Study app (of course), and OpenMBTA.  Sometimes I still forget that I have it when I want to look things up, and I'm sure I haven't figured out half of the cool stuff it can do, but it's been useful so far (except for the one time it froze four hours after I got it and I questioned every decision I'd ever made in life up to that point--I'm melodramatic sometimes, okay?).

Of course, I have a way to go, vis-à-vis tech-savviness.  For instance, I'm still blogging on my laptop like a normal 20th-century type of person.

   

   

*I also like the Kate Nash album "Made of Bricks," but that's irrelevant here.

**Saying 'dang it' (or a harsher version thereof) always indicates to a salesperson that you mean business.