I only own a Nokia smartphone because regular cell phones have practically died out here. I'm not much of a phone person anyway and the only reason I actually need a cell phone (besides for emergencies) is because I'm getting a number of automated text messages on it.
I'm not against tech, but often I jst don't see the point of needing to have a particular gimmick. But I'm not above wanting to have gimmicks either.
I've never owned a DVR, because I stopped watching actual television about 8 years ago. I don't even watch any news anymore. My TV is a strict DVD/BR presentation machine by now.
I catch news on the radio while driving to/from work and I read news websites on the net.
I don't have internet on my phone, because I'm sitting 8 hours at work in front of an internet PC (like right now
) and have one at home. What would I need internet on the phone for?
I do have an Amazon Kindle (don't ask me what generation) not because I wanted to read actual books on it (with them I still prefer bathtub-proof paperback) but because I also read fan-fiction on the internet (*world-wide groaning ensues*) and I don't actually like to read long texts on a monitor.
But in the end it wasn't what I had hoped for. I had to copy the texts into Winword, formatted the page a certain way (I used A5 as paper format and used the Kindle sideways) and the printed it to PDF. Then I copied the file onto the Kindle.
The problem is that the Kindle can only handle "proper" eBooks and can optimize them for its display. When dealing with PDFs it does the best it can but if the page width is wider than the display you get a horizontal scrollbar (so to speak) and you constantly have to switch from left to right and left again - in addition to the natural page-turning. Hence the format to A5.
In the end it was just too much hassle.
A few months ago I bought me an iPad 3 WiFi (still no internet via cell phone tech
) - basically as a replacement for the Kindle. And it works great. The retina display is awesomely clear and the Safari browser has a zoom technology that with one touch zooms a page column to the width of the iPad. If I were it do do here, what would happen is, that the left column with the user names and avatars would be pushed out on the left side and the actual text field would be zoomed up to the width of the display.
Other things I do with the iPad is playing Angry Birds
and having DVD Profiler on it to check my collection when I'm in the store buying new DVDs.
Speaking of DVD Profiler Mobile. I used to own a classic PDA which I bought about 10 years ago. It had only 2 purposes: Manage our Poker nights and DVD Profiler Mobile.
Unfortunately the display broke a few months ago which was another reason for the iPad.
Being a software developer I had written me a small program where I could enter how many chips of a certain value I have at all (300 of 25s, 300 of 100s, 150 of 200s and so forth), what the stack size is supposed to be and how many players there are this evening. And the software would tell me how I have to divide the chips to make equal stacks for everyone.
(If anyone's interested,
here it is (runs on every Windows, not just Windows Mobile))
And in the end (because counting chips always leads to inconsistencies in the end
) I used Pocket Excel to calculate if the sum of the stacks everyone claimed to have amounted to the sum of the initial stacks.
I also used to own a Netbook. I used it to watch TV episodes while riding the train to my mom's or granny's and while I was in the hospital. It also came in handy when I did my DVD inventory in the living room (
DVD Inventory software installed, barcode scanner connected and off we went).
But after I got the iPad it collected dust so I gave it to my mom who does freelance tax accounting as a second job so that when she visits her clients she doesn't have to carry her heavy 17" widescreen laptop with her.
I'm using my Nokia smartphone as an MP3 player but I'm not overly happy with the user experience. Case in point: All my albums are properly stored in a seperate folder, each having their own
M3U playlist. When I copy the entire folder onto the smartphone, the software recognizes the playlist and shows it to me as playable option. So far so good. But since the phone has limited storage capabilities I have to remove some of the folders every once in a while. The phone updates its database with the removed and newly added files but it does not remove the playlist again. I have to remove every outdated playlist by hand - individually.
In the same vain I can't just simply empty the text messages inbox, I have to remove every SMS by itself.
I never owned a Laser Disc (player).
I never owned a gaming console after the
Sega Master System II