How do you use your cell phone?

I have a big Nikon d90 it gets heavy and if I'm going to set up a shot, the iPhone works well for this. It's a crappy camera but it's good for closeups or pics on the sly too. I save some of the shots, not all. I use the tri-pod app for most of them because it only takes a pic when your hand is steady, so it saves me from having to sort through a ton of blurry shots. I'm a bit of camera geek, so I have a whole bunch of editing apps as well. I downloaded a couple of photographers apps that will give you hints or the proper shutter speed and apertures for my big camera and more info on how to use different settings on the camera.


I have a charger in the car for the phone and camera, but I'm pretty good about charging them both frequently at home. I've been burned by my bad practices before...




I just moved back to Edmonton after living in Vancouver for the past year and a half. I wasn't working then but I did a lot of traveling across Canada as so on. I just started working again, I'm in marketing so I take a lot of pictures just in case. I'm known for stopping the car and taking pictures whenever the mood strikes me. This behavior drives everyone, but me he he, crazy! Again, Camera geek..

Predictive texting lets you type in the first 3 letters of a word the word automatically shows on the screen then continue like that......I cant tell you exactly what we talk about, example of a convo would go something like this

- Howz it? wots the goss?
reply - nuthin much, wot u up to sat?
- yours I guess lol... wot time?

and so forth, its not pages of a novel... just very quick and short messages, also helps keeping in touch with my buddies overseas instead of making a costly toll call. As I say its all in seconds and we can keep it up for ages depending on what the goss is about.
Words maybe a whole page approx 20 to as little as 3....no I dont miss their voices. Of course I will use my home phone if I ever feel the need to talk to them direct, but texting, for me anyway, is just more practical and convenient.

It's really just short emails. The predictive thing KiwiChic refers to is that you just start typing out a word and it gives you suggestions for what word you might mean and you click if it's the right word (saving time). Mine doesn't do that, but it does automatically extend abbreviations (yr --> year, that sort of thing).

My BB has a full qwerty keyboard and it's really not hard to type. I hammer stuff out in about the same time it takes me to type here (which is fast). I've been using these for over 10 years though, just got my newest one last year but I had one of the earliest RIM prototypes. (Created, as I know I've said, for the Deaf community. I do think that's kind of cool as I look around and see how ubiquitous they are now.)

So, my texts are usually pretty much what you'd see me type here. They're full sentences, complete words, etc.

Pretty much exactly what I'd write in an email in an office environment to someone I knew was in front of their computer



I don't think so. I can usually rattle off a message in a matter of seconds. Between dialing, waiting for someone to answer, and exchanging pleasantries before getting down to the message you want to convey, texting is probably faster.



The fact that I'm deaf skews this, since I don't call anyway, but from how my hearing friends use text (with each other, not just me), it's a sort of less-urgent form of a phone call. When you answer a phone you have to stop what you're doing even if it's just to say "sorry, I'm busy, will get back to you later." When you text, it can be dealt with immediately if the person is available or a bit later if they're not available right then.

Urgency level kinda goes:

- Phone (now!)
- Text (reasonable expectation of getting a response today, but not urgent [unless noted])
- email (today would be nice, less than a week is OK)

Interesting article in today's paper, I thought this thread would be about it when I saw the title:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/technology/personaltech/14talk.html
Excerpt:

Yeah, I like the all-in-one-ness. I don't carry a lot of stuff around, and I love being able to whip it out and get a picture -- quality isn't great (I take "real" pictures with my 35 mm), but often quality is not bad. The screen image on my BB was a pic I took of sozlet this winter, it seemed seasonally off as summer arrived and the other day when we were shopping I thought "hey nice light" and snapped a quick pic of sozlet to replace the one I had. Turned out pretty nice.

Absolutely, I have one photo app called "Best Camera", you take the shot and edit and send out in one go. Like the guy who designed the apps says, the best camera is the one you've got...

ok then, now I'm learnding.

I got curious, and just texted myself for the first time.

A bit underwhelming, since I had nothing to say to myself

If I were to text soz, I would get a full qwerty keyboard, and not in abbreviations like our friend kiwi chic does.

Those back and forths,

what are you doing?
Nothin', what are you doin'?
IDK, nothing, what do you want to do
IDK, what do YOU want to do?

seems, to me annoying. (actually, reminds me of the movie Marty, if you've ever seen it.

Just like the example of an interested guy texting me alla time.

What am I doing?
Why? You're just curious? well, sorry about that, I'm busy actually, don't know what you'd care what I'm doing right now anyway.

Sex? Now?
It's the middle of the day!

(just kidding)

Okay, basically, I just want to phone and get messages. I don't want to text because I'm on an 'older' phone where you have to hit key three times to get "C", etc... screw it. But one of my sisters (and everybody else, seemingly) has an I-Phone and I hear daily about how I would love it and blah blah blah. She gets GPS, internet, etc etc and now that my contract is up, I may have to bite the bullet and get the damn thing. I haven't investigated it yet so I don't know, but a little research goes a long way. Do I need to take pictures with it? No. I have a camera. Do I need to downplay music on it? No. Do I NEED to get my email on it? No. I have a laptop. So i don't know. I'm not one of these geeky people and it's not intuitive to me. It's a big question mark looming on my horizon.

First of all, very few people have my cell phone number. I figure that if they want me, they can leave a message on my landline answering machine. The only exception, is that when I am travelling, and am going to meet up with people, I will give them my number.

I use the phone for calls only. When I first got the phone, I did not like the wallpaper that they offered, so I took a nice picture and kept it as the wallpaper. I also downloaded the theme song to "The Exorcist" as my ringtone. For some reason, I have gotten a number of remarks from young people, that they did not think that I would have that particular piece of music as my ringtone. What did they expect, "Country Gardens"?

I formerly had a Razr, and swore that I would keep it until it died. It was small, the sound was clear, and it was perfect for me. Then I got a new car with bluetooth. My phone was too old to pair with the bluetooth, so I had to get this other phone, which is ok, but not nearly as small as the Razr. Funny thing, I think that the phone that I got came out just a few months before smartphones went bigtime, and was obsolete practically the moment I walked out of the phone store. It does some stuff, and connects to the internet, but I am not interested.

Last year, when I was in Cleveland for my surgery, I had the Razr turned into a paid up phone so that Mr. P. and I could stay in contact. We only bought the minimum amount of minutes, so that the the service lapsed in three months.

My dream is a phone with the highest quality components, that made calls only. Unfortunately, that is not what the public wants, so I suppose that I will never be able to get one.

Theme from the Exorcist....Tubular Bells it's called.

THAT would give me the heeby jeebys

Actually, I'm starting to feel pretty good that I started this thread.

I'm not out to knock anyone who has use for, or wants all sorts of features and applications. I have to admit though, that it's nice to hear I'm not the only one who pretty much uses it as phone, or in my case, a clock.

Beyond that, the thing just isn't that interesting to me.

Anything besides that, like internet access, email, can just wait until I'm sitting behind a computer.

I think, umm...what was making me feel sort of out of it, and dinosaurish, was the fact that it seems when I hear people talking about, or see them using their cell phones in public, not as something to ring someone up on, but some other thing....they make it seem so....Necessary.

It's like there's either this look of intense concentration on their face, like they are doing something Really Important, or performing some function so casually like "I can't wait until these things are just inserted into our brains at birth"

I guess it's the age old story. When I was a teenager, I would literally spend hours on the phone with a girlfriend after school, even though I had just left her at the schoolbus stop 30 minutes before, and having had 3 classs with her throughout the day.

I'd also spead hours in my bedroom with my head between the 2 speakers of a shitty portable stereo I had, listening to 45 rpm records. The hours I would spend making sure that little plastic doo-hicky was properly placed in the center of every record was time well spent.

Now I just want to know if we're out of clam chowder.

holy ****, now we're going to have 27 posts about clam chowder.

new england, definately.

oh....what I said above about people looking like they are doing something Really Important?

Part of me says inside "I want to do something Really Important too!"

Now I'm starting to suspect they are reading something about someone from American Idol deciding to go on Dancing with the Stars.

why do they even make Manhatten clam chowder?

No one ever admits to liking it.

You would know about that because you spend so much time in Manhatten?

Heh, yeah, I'm sure a lot of it is not actually important.

I think part of it is how ad-hoc your life is. I have some things that are reliable and scheduled (get kid to school, pick up kid from school), then a whole bunch of things that are more vague (meet at the gym -- when? does my friend need me to pick up her kid from school? it's a long way to that party, maybe we can carpool, you drop off the girls and I'll pick 'em up. etc, etc.).

It made me crazy before I got the BB because the people I talk to most often for that sort of thing (other moms) often don't use email. I'd send something fairly urgent and two weeks later get "Oh sorry, I NEVER use email anymore, just saw this!" For whatever reason, that group seems to have moved away from the computer and on to the smartphone (probably because we're all running around most of the day).

I gotta say, though, that I was meeting a friend at restaurant and couldn't find it, so I asked this lady who was sitting in a convertible if she'd heard of it or knew where it was. She immediately pulls out her iPhone, googles the restaurant and tells me it's located miles from where we were. She then googled Maps and told me how to get there. All that in under five minutes. Impressive.

My main thing is I don't want to spend the TIME and ENERGY to learn how everything works.

When Karen got hers, she downloaded every application possible and proceeded to bore the pants off me with descriptions of all of them and everything they could do.

With my present (and failing) cell phone: I refilled it every 1 and a half to 3 months with about $25 plus tax. I rarely use it to talk: usually my sister, Tracy, and my father. For the most part? C'est tout.

Recently, a couple of coworkers/friends have texted me on my phone in which I didn't believe I could even receive personal texts (other then notes from T-Mobile regarding my minute refilling status). I didn't even realize my plan allowed me to text others. Last Saturday was the first time I ever texted anybody with any kind of phone.

With my new phone? Depending on the ease of use of the web features on my new phone? I'll either use email if its relatively easy and if not I'll probably text a bit more ... but not much considering I won't have a separate keyboard to type.

For the most part? I'll use my new phone as a camera to capture the quick New York Cityscape snapshots and short videos I always wanted to take in the past but couldn't because I didn't have a camera on me to take them with.

At the risk of this being an invitation for anti-technology/antisocial criticism I'll spill my beans.

My cell phone is a computer, I use it in many of the same ways you use a computer (check email, browse web etc) and see it as a more portable computer than a phone (the more powerful they get the less I use laptops and desktops and the more I can free myself from the office).

- I don't have a house phone (I have a voip US number for business but no local house phone) so it's my only local phone I use. I typically make calls to arrange times and places to meet friends.

- I also use it for my contacts database (haven't memorized many numbers since having a cell phone) so it's my Rolodex as well. It's a database for all my email addresses (syncs with my email address contact book), addresses and phone numbers.

- I use it for my watch (I don't like watches and haven't used one since having a cell phone).

- Similarly, it's also my only alarm clock.

- I play games on it a lot (mainly at home), and it's pretty much the only way I play any video games (and it can run games that I used to play on Playstation and PC). The games range from scrabble types of word games to full-fledged sports games etc. I don't watch TV and other than the internet it's my primary source of bite-sized entertainment. The main games I play are Civilization, chess (correspondence chess where we take turns whenever we like and are not both playing at once), Football Manager (a soccer management simulation), Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, and Fifa 10 but there are also games I occasionally play like GTA, Sim City and many others. It's basically my only toy

- My phone has my calendar on it, and it gives me reminders. It recently saved my butt, I had a date scheduled and totally forgot about it till I got the 10-minutes-till-event reminder. I would have totally stood the poor gal up and the phone is a handy appointment tracker (calendar on computer doesn't help me as much, sometimes I'll have a meeting I forgot about and be out at lunch and the phone will be what reminds me to get home to the office for the meeting).

- I also have my encrypted "wallet" on my phone, which is a program that holds all my passwords and other numbers (credit cards, id numbers etc) on it. It syncs with my desktop (like most of the data on my phone, so that it is backed up) but it's very useful for me to have with me at all times because it means I can carry less with me (e.g. I might not carry a document or card with me because it's on my phone, an example is a video rental store number, I don't carry their card in my wallet, which I keep as slim as possible).

- I also use it as a portable music player (it can hold all my music) if I want that kind of thing (usually only when playing live poker) or taking a walk. It's not the antis0cial thing you often make it out to be, I tend to use it when I want to listen to music without waking someone up, or when I'm alone or very bored on a very quiet poker table (I leave the volume low so I can hear anyone talk, as that can be a good source of poker information).

- On a plane I may take a movie with me on the phone, to watch instead of watching the same movies the play on the planes over and over.

- I don't tend to text much, usually a couple times a week a friend will send a text about dinner or something and I'll reply (maybe they are at work and can't talk or have some other reason for using an asynchronous medium). A typical conversation goes "Want to do dinner after work? Meet at ___ restaurant?" "Sure, see you then." I've never had a conversation by text that was more than 3 exchanges, the point for me and those who text me is usually to save time, so we never chat by txt.

- I get instant messages on my phone too, but I only use instant messages with two coworkers (no chatting with friends on the phone, I don't use IM for anything other than work). Most of the time when I get a message I go to a computer, as I don't like typing much on the phone.

- My phone has camera and video but I rarely use them (mainly because I rarely take pictures or video at all on any device). The most common use I have for it is to take a picture of a flyer and its phone numbers/addresses if I only need it once and don't want to write it all down.

- My phone also receives all my snail mail. I have US addresses through a service that scans incoming mail and I can read it on my phone from around the world and never touch my snail mail.

- My phone also does mapping, with GPS, which is useful when I don't know an area well.

- I have other communication apps (twitter, facebook) which I don't use too much (several times a week) but is usually the only way I'll consume those services (twitter I use a bit more on a regular computer).

- My phone is also my calculator, on the occasional case that it comes in handy.

- My phone also gets my rss feeds, so I can browse the news when I'm stuck somewhere.

- I can also read books on my phone, but I don't really like the small screen for that and don't use it very much.

- I have various internet content apps that I occasionally use (some examples are youtube, dailymotion, NY Times, CFR, NPR, C-SPAN, CNN (has video news too), Aljazeera (the only app I have with live streaming video news) and other similar news/finance apps). I tend to read a bit here and there on the phone in situations like waiting in the car for something, or in bed instead of having a laptop.

- I can connect to windows computers remotely, so from my phone I can login to my home desktop computer if I need something, or to a server to do work from outside the office. It's horrible on this small screen so it's only when I'm not around a computer.

- I have a compass on my phone, which is useful in Costa Rica where there aren't addresses and people use directions (e.g. from the gas station go 800 meters north, 400 meters east).

- I can view any of my documents (word processing, spreadsheets) on my phone if I need it. I prefer not to but it's better than going home to use a computer on those rare occasions where I need it (also let's me travel without carrying a computer sometimes).

It's a computer so there are a ton of other things I can do with it (limited mainly by the imagination of the programmers who come up with the apps), but that aren't very common for me, an example would be that if there is a song I hear that I don't know I can have the phone listen to it for a few seconds and it will tell me what it is (I can also hum the song to search that way too).

To me, a phone is a smaller computer and I use it for non-phone things more than as a phone.

Locating stuff and places while I'm away from my computer is why I'm spending an extra $10 a month for unlimited web access. Though not as polished as an iPhone, hopefully my new phone will help me find restaurants and nearby independent bookstores so I can browse and waste ... umm... intellectually invest even more of my money.

I don't know many people above 18 who do that though. I'm sure plenty of folks older than that do text like mad but most adults I know use texts like this:

"Gonna be at Steve's bar for the game in case you are interested."

That's it. I'll see him there if I am interested.

Or something like this, I'll call and get voicemail, and send a text instead (it's easier to consume than voicemail) with something like "call me when you are free".



At least he didn't send a penis pic! That is the truly bizarre use of texting to me. I don't get that kind of conversational texting either, once the exchange goes beyond a few sentences I prefer another medium (phone call, wait till we see each other etc).