Confessions of an App Lover

aka My Blackberry Experiment

I love Apps. No question about it. An observer who dropped in from another time might make an argument that I love them more than my family, friends, and work. I mess with them when I should be paying attention to my kids. I check on them when I am playing golf with my buddies. I look at them when I should be doing real, productive work. I have apps like Flipboard and Zite and Pulse whose main objective is to allow me to read about other apps that I need. I love ‘em, plain and simple.

However, I was recently on vacation with my brother who as a resident of London and employee of a large company is still trapped in the Blackberry world, meaning his phone pretty much only communicates with other phones, and therefore other people. His Blackberry killed itself just as we were going to play golf. Rather than freaking out as I am sure I would have done, he calmly turned the damned thing off and didn’t say another thing about it. My guess is he didn’t think another thing about it either, but I thought about it twenty times during the round. . . and it wasn’t even my phone.

This episode got me to thinking the following: Do all of the cool things that my phone can do really improve my life? Or is my phone still first and foremost a method of communication and all the cool stuff just has me sidetracked from the stuff that matters (family, friends, productivity at work)?

Therefore I am attempting an experiment based on the following facts:

  1. My iPhone 5s is on its last legs. Battery is a goner; screen is cracked; black blob on screen gets bigger and smaller for no apparent reason but covers maybe 10% of viewing area, etc.
  2. I own, for one reason or another, a Blackberry Q10 phone that works fine.
  3. I also own an iPad Air which carries virtually all of the apps that I would ever need in a less convenient package (more on this below).

I will, from roughly August 1st through at least the introduction of the iPhone 6 (which I fully expect this experiment to succumb to), have a phone that will basically perform a single task: communication with other humans. This Blackberry can run all of the communication tools that are necessary in my life: phone, email, texting, Skype, Google Talk, WhatsApp, Twitter DM. Very little (maybe none) of the non-personal communicating I do happens outside of these apps. I will also load Uber (because drunk driving is bad) and maybe a couple of other more necessary things, but thats it.

My hope is the following: I will still have access to everything in the Apple catalog through my iPad, however, the iPad is just inconvenient enough (and I am just lazy enough) that each time I think I need to use Duolingo to teach myself German while hanging out with my family or check the click rate on our last MailChimp email while playing golf with my friends, the hassle or impossibility of going to find said iPad will make me realize that this sort of activity is not time sensitive and should not preempt the things that are.

I will update this post along the way if anything interesting happens. And if it doesn’t, I hope the iPhone 6 is as awesome as I think its going to be.