Reply to post: Re: Consumers are dumb

Re: Consumers are dumb

> If you're talking about ye olde Nokia phones, the battery in them could last a fair bit, but only if one didn't do much with them. Ever taken a look at the talk time for those? It's short

To be fair, I used to own an Ericsson T39 - a mildly ugly flip phone, but it would last a fortnight between charges with the extended battery. My housemate had the same phone with a third-party battery and that would last a full month between charges.

Still, like you say, with the small monochrome LCD screen, you were pretty much limited to voice calls, SMSs and WAP text-based pages. Oh, the fun I had, browsing the BBC's WAP site while sitting on the bus, one paragraph at a time...

And yeah, I just bought a new phone - the LG V30. And yeah, it cost me £600. And yeah, I picked it partly because of the highly useful ultra-wide-angle lens and the small improvements in photo quality over the increasingly tatty S7 Edge it replaced.

However, I also use it to browse the web, check emails, jot down notes, keep an eye on the company IM system, log into social networks, navigate around the country, manage my calendar, keep an eye on my bank balance and act as a remote control for my desktop PC and media players.

Sometimes, I even read books, listen to music or watch videos on it.

Oh, and at a pinch, it serves as a torch, spirit level, real time translation tool and occasional DJ mixer.

So yeah: £600 is a reasonable chunk of cash. But it'd almost certainly be more expensive - and a lot more inconvenient - to lug around all of the devices that it's replaced.

Back in the day, I did actually swear by "best of breed" - I carried a PDA for reading ebooks and web-browsing, a compact camera, a mobile phone and an MP3 player. But modern mobile phones have long since become more than Good Enough to handle all of the above.

Except for MP3 playback; I still use an old iPod Classic. Partly because it has a huge amount of storage and superb battery life but also partly because it means I don't have a headphone cable dangling in the way when doing stuff on the phone...