My phone situation
Why I might not use my phone the way you do
Most people nowadays take for granted their internet access. People as young as ten have smartphones with mobile data plans. You all see your phones and your digital life in the mainstream way.
I don’t.
For me, my phone life has always been a game of catch-up. I didn’t even have a mobile phone until my penultimate year in Primary school, where a miscommunication resulted in me and the person assigned to pick me up waiting for each other for hours. After that, it was decided that enough was enough. I needed a phone.
The phone I ended up getting was a Nokia 1209, from a little store in Toa Payoh selling cheap Nokias. It was my first ever phone, and I played with it all that I could. It wasn’t much of a distraction from studies, though, because it wasn’t much more than a phone. In fact, the only thing that it had going for it was colour display (come to think of it, rather useless as it couldn’t show pictures. It hadn’t got a camera, even.)
The next phone I got some time near the end of Primary Six. This was a Nokia 6600i Slide, which actually had a camera. And a slide function. I remember using this phone in Secondary One, snapping pictures of the Volvo B10M Mark IV DMs serving 48, calling at the bus stop. In fact, this phone got my activity as a bus photographer started. But that’s a story for another time.
Sometime in Secondary Two, a Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 (my first smartphone) as acquired for me, the arrangement being that I used it on weekends. I still didn’t have a mobile data plan, and I used the phone with the wi-fi at home. In school, I brought the Nokia, occasionally along with my ageing iPad 2 for ICT lessons.
I can’t remember how or when, but that Nokia, in all its glory, decided to break from that wondrous stereotype of indestructibility and fail on me on a Sunday night. Thus I was allowed to bring the Ace to school, and connect it to the school wi-fi.
The Ace served me through most of Secondary 3, and much of Year 3’s CREP was conceived and constructed with it. However, its Gingerbread software was fast losing support from all ends and soon it was rather unproductive to use it. So now I have this Samsung Galaxy S4, which I got with KitKat and now has Lollipop. It also has a very good battery life.
After this history of my phones, I shall now go into the problems that have faced me since I got the Ace. These are my “smartphone problems”. A lot of them were solved when I got the S4, but some are coming back.
If you think I’m ranting and feel that I should be “lucky to even have a smartphone”, skip to the end of the page to see my response to that.
My immediate problem with the Ace was its lack of storage. It had all of one gigabyte, about half of which was locked in system storage. I only had a few hundred megabytes of photo space, and apps, and everything else.
Space was my investment when it came to the phone. Every app downloaded and installed is a careful and calibrated decision. While others considered battery usage, or the cost of apps, I carefully measured and calculated the space it would take up. Only cached space would interfere with my plans. I had to clear RAM and caches almost hourly.
The S4 now has 16 gigabytes of space. Those of you with 32-GB phones will not face this problem, at least not on the scale that I do. My biggest app now is Facebook, but Instagram often develops a cache size that can beat the whole Facebook storage combined. Google Drive had also split into four apps — Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides — which all have the combined mass of a herd of elephants. And Pleco, that wonderful Chinese dictionary, takes up about a hundred MB in itself. I keep it because it needs no internet connection and has been immensely useful to my studying of Chinese.
Others have not been so lucky. I had to uninstall Dictionary.com after a day of use as it just took up too much space. Google Translate lives a threatened existence on my phone, ready to go anytime I need the extra twenty megabytes.
If not for my strange overuse of the 16GB I have (probably due to the Lollipop upgrade), I would probably be blogging simultaneously here, in Blogspot and in WordPress, while sprucing up my bus pictures in VSCO. But I don’t have the space, unfortunately.
This has also had the side effect of forcing me to upload my pictures to a computer weekly. I have to boot up the computer to see that snap of the Yutong intercity coach I took last week, because it’s left my phone already. And when a trip to Siem Reap nearly stretched my phone to the limits, I was thankful to be back home and able to offload the entire trip of pictures before my phone shut down from lack of storage. Perhaps that’s what caused the Nokia 6600i to conk out.
But I should be thankful for the 16GB, up from the approximately 600MB the Ace had.
The second problem has been helped a lot by my upgrade to the S4. The Ace ran on Gingerbread (Android 2.3.6) and basically, it wasn’t supported by anything. Even Facebook was barely updating. My keyboards were all stuck at the five-versions-ago-version. Even Instagram had a limited set of filters and editing tools, so my photos had a Nineties look, but the wrong Nineties look. I had in mind a look which deliberately oversharpened the photograph and made it look a little faded (this is what my current Instagram photos are supposed to be like). But my photographs came out looking like they had been taken with a primitive digital camera. Not what I wanted.
Anyway, the upgrade to an S4 has solved that problem for now, and the recent software update to Lollipop has, if anything, put me in an even better situation for app availability.
But one thing’s remained constant all this while. I haven’t got a mobile data plan. My only source of Internet connection, since I got a smartphone, has been wi-fi. This has certainly led to many problems. The only good thing that’s come out of it, according to my parents, is that I don’t become addicted to the Internet. My parents have this habit of switching off the wi-fi when I’m in mid-conversation with my friends, and sometimes say I’m “addicted” when I complain. In situations like these, I feel you can’t blame “addiction” for feeling a bit disgruntled when that happens. It’s like trying to have a conversation between a train passenger and a person on the platform — when the conversation is interrupted by the doors closing and the train leaving, you can’t really blame the passenger for being on a train.
But when my conversation is disrupted due to my suddenly going offline, it isn’t that bad. It’s worse when I can’t even start an online conversation — with my parents.
I’m talking, of course, about the disruptions to the school wi-fi. As a result of wireless@VS going down, I now have to find an alternative way of communicating with my parents. I used to be able to use WhatsApp — it was so much more convenient than SMS. It was free, and also, you could talk in groups with everyone in the family and send images. Now, I’m back to messaging one parent at a time. And using five to six messages to describe what I see. Did I mention that my phone plan is pre-paid? Yes, the week that wireless@VS went down, I ran out of balance money in the phone. This incident made my parents understand some of my phone problems — they are good people and had good intentions when deciding not to buy a mobile data plan for me. It’s just that these good intentions would have worked out well if the school wi-fi worked. If not for the shutdown, I wouldn’t be complaining about these problems.
The next time any of you want to complain about your phone, saying that it isn’t the latest in model, doesn’t have the biggest screen, or can’t get the fastest surfing speeds, remember that half the time I don’t even have an Internet connection at all.
Of course, you could argue that my situation is already better than those who cannot afford to even have a mobile phone. However, I am living in Singapore and studying in Victoria School, and as such I am subject to the expectations of a person living in Singapore and studying in Victoria School, such as group projects, deadlines and assignment submission. And it’s hard to meet those same expectations if you had no space for any apps and no data plan.
So Victoria School admin team, please try to get the wi-fi up as quickly as possible. It would go a long way in my projects. And assignments. And Medium.
