My #Droid

My life in Australia began with an iPhone 5. It was perfectly suited to my lifestyle. I could connect with those at home via iMessage and FaceTime. I could contact my Australian network to create plans. I could take good photos at event and create memories. For some reason a constant in my life is that when things are really, really good — a piece of technology breaks. I am not ascribing any particular significance to this except for to identify a strange pattern. New Years 2015 the iPhone 5 cracked. Pretty badly. It didn’t matter though because I would rather be having a wonderful time than be upset about a thing. When it comes down to it, my phone is just a thing.

Fast forward a couple of months from the time of the crack and you have an unfortunate situation where I also was suffering from sever enjoyment and suddenly, water on the crack. To me the crack was no problem. A sort of battle wound that if anything else prevented me from touching the phone more than I should, which I appreciated. Now with the water situation, and half the phone’s screen disappearing into darkness, it was no longer usable.

Next phase. By this point I knew I wasn’t going to be living in Australia long enough to sign up for any cell phone plan. I had an iPhone4 but it wasn’t easily being unlocked by the cell phone companies. Talk about loss of control of devices, I owned a device that they were not allowing me to operate the way I wanted. But oh well, I had to figure out my next option.

The cheapest smart phone available was my best option. I could have uber, I could listen to sound cloud, I could do my online banking and keep in touch. The problem with my new phone was it’s touch screen. I named it droid and it really began to display a personality of its own. It had a delay on the screen and it was not very sensitive. With predictive typing it came up with some interesting sentences of its own. The droid and I found an equilibrium but never a balance. In time, we never got along. Always the droid ruled my time instead of me ruling my own time.

The idea of using my tech is to create more space in my life for life. The time I take up touching my technology should be as efficient, enjoyable, and effective as possible. Although my droid could do all the things I needed from it, it did not help me to create this space in my life. It did, however, keep me entertained with its antics like autocorrecting #droid into #jesus. The other benefit of my droid that I am not really ready to get away from was its ability to compress data. I could listen to streaming music, video, surf the web and I used about a third as much data as I would on my iPhone. There were upsides and downsides but most importantly, the droid helped me to form a new perspective on how I interact with my technology and pushed me not to accept the status quo.