Oy, Modern technology!

We carry our phones everywhere, and they are often convenient. But they can also be a pain. Take my smart phone…

I got a temporary gig, and not wanting to depend on my elderly ‘dumb’ cell phone, I decided to see what I could find. My criteria were few, and my preconceived notions non-existent: I needed a phone that was cheap and a service provider offering a plan that I could ‘pay as you go’ so I wouldn’t be stuck with a fluctuating monthly bill.

What I found were several inexpensive ‘first-gen’ smart phones, a lot of extremely (to me, at least) expensive ‘modern’ phones…and one bargain that interested me. It was a (fairly) new smart phone, a Motorola Moto E, and the price was right: less than $50 before tax. I had some questions about the service provider, Virgin Mobile, but time was short and I decided to buy.

Learning my new phone was a steep curve I needed to climb quickly, and the first step was activating it. The instructions with the phone were far from clear, leading me to buy a “minutes card” that didn’t have enough credit to activate the phone. Several calls to a very frustrating customer service line later, I found out my error and managed to get the phone up and running by buying another card with enough credit on it to activate the phone. After that, with a little help from my sister, I got the basics down and when I got on the job, the phone worked well and gave as good service as any of those my fellow temp employees had.

After the job had ended, I kept the phone active, partly for contact with the temp agency, and partly to see what else I could do with it. Hulu soon joined the line-up of apps on my phone, and I would hate to see the number of hours I spent streaming anime. Fortunately, by the time I installed this app, I’d joined my phone to my home network, so I was getting my data over my wifi system instead of paying the phone company for all that time. It also proved to be my ‘go-to’ device for watching news from the RTE, Ireland’s national broadcast network. A few other apps stand out, and I find it to be a useful little piece of hardware…but it can still be a source of frustration.

One thing I liked about Virgin was the fact that I could buy a new card to renew my service, enter the validation information off the back, and when my monthly service time ended, the phone would know I had the credit in place and automatically renew my current plan. Well, it used to. This past month, I bought a card a few days before the end of my service time, did the usual entry, and went about my business. Then I tried to call someone the day after my contract had ended…and my phone told me I hadn’t purchased a service plan. The credit was still there, but now I had to physically tell the phone that, yes, I want to renew my current plan. Annoying, to say the least.

Another annoying thing are the number of apps I can’t get rid of. Because it’s an Android device, all the security and other updates come through the Google App store. There are several apps, like Google Talk, a chat service I have no interest in…but even though I’ve told the phone to uninstall them, they still keep insisting that I update them. There’s also a suit of games that aren’t installed, but there’s an icon I can’t get rid of, taking up space on one of my ‘desktops’ (and, no doubt, eating space in my phone’s memory).

Most annoying of all was Hulu’s recent decision to stop offering users the option to watch *anything* without subscribing to them. I was willing to be bombarded by the five-or-more minutes of commercials they’d shove into an anime that was only twenty-odd minutes long, but to have to put up with that AND pay for the privilege…no, the next time Hulu wants to update it’s app, it’s gone.

So there it is, modern technology at it’s usual: equal parts useful and annoyingly frustrating. No doubt anyone reading this has as bad or worse experiences they could relate. But we put up with the annoyance for the convenience, and hope we’ve made a good bargain.