I reached into my pocket yesterday for my phone and all I found was some tired denim with a rectangle worn into the fabric. I just wanted to check the time and like an amputee I still felt the weight of my smartphone in my pocket. Breaking old habits may be hard.
My phone actually sold on Amazon yesterday and I shipped it to someone in Maryland. This experiment didn’t feel as binding until I completed the packing slip at UPS and sent my phone away across the country. Up until now, despite my phone not having service, I could still use it she where there was wifi. But this is the real deal and changing my life will be more difficult than I imagined. How did I become so dependent on a piece of hardware that until 5 years ago didn’t even exist. It’s terrifying and liberating. But mostly terrifying.
I received my email from Google this morning informing me that my number has been successfully ported. In the upper left corner of my iPhone the daunting “No Service” is prominently displayed. The first call through Talkatone was not as smooth a call as I might have liked; while my iPhone vibrated sporadically, there was no other indication that I was receiving a call. The second call gave me a notification to tap and answer while the call quality was not superb, it got the job done. But I must remember that voice is but one antiquated way of communicating that I eventually hope to phase out entirely.
I flipped my phone to Airplane mode and turned wifi on. Whenever I open my message app it warns me that Airplane mode is on, which is mildly annoying, but only mildly. Thus goes day 1.
Turned off Airplane mode today. The disruptive pop-up message every time I tried to iMessage from my phone was getting obnoxious. I don’t like the “No Service” in the corner of my display, but primarily for aesthetic reasons and not real for real ones.
I connected my iPhone to my iPad’s personal hotspot on my lunch break and called my girlfriend. She was only mildly annoyed knowing full well I was making the call to use her as a guinea pig less than to hear her lyrical voice (and it is quite lyrical). But the call went fine, the sound quality was acceptable and the connection between my phone and iPad was solid. Later my phone inexplicably dropped off the personal hotspot my iPad was broadcasting from my bag. Not sure why.
Later in the evening I connected my bluetooth headphones directly to my iPad and called my mom while driving. I was curious to see how much data is actually consumed by a phonecall so I reset my data usage in my settings and checked it after the fact. It seems to upload a megabyte and download about a megabyte a minute per call. Not too shabby.
Bonne nuit.
