It took me nearly a year of DVR ownership to learn how to record a football game and another year to figure out how to record the entire game.
The only reason I can operate my garage door opener is because it has just one button. If it had more than that, I’d probably have to leave my car parked in the driveway.
So I have no idea why I even considered buying a smartphone, especially since I still haven’t learned how to use most of the features on my current dumbphone.
Whenever I hear the “call waiting” beep, for instance, I immediately panic and start pushing buttons. This generally results in disconnecting the new caller, disconnecting the current caller and erasing the last six messages in my mail box.
Still, there are 84 million smartphones currently in use in this country and they’re getting more popular every day, because they have a lot of wonderful features.
You can listen to your favorite music on them. You can surf the Internet. You can access a global positioning system if you get lost while you’re driving. Which probably happens to a lot to smartphone users, because they’re so busy listening to their music and surfing the Internet that they drove past their exit 20 miles ago.
The feature that tempts me most is the ability to keep in constant touch with my e-mail. No more waiting to find out the best Viagra prices.
So I go to a store that sells smartphones and a helpful young employee explains how they work, using words and phrases such as megs, gigs and HTML browser.
One of the few words I recognize is “apps,” which is short for “applications.” But everybody always says “apps,” because life’s too short for four-syllable words and it’s a lot easier to spell.
The phone he demonstrates has 10,000 apps, he says, although some smartphones have 100,000. I’m not sure why anybody needs 100,000 apps.
If they used each app for just 10 minutes, it would take 694 days to get through all of them and they would die from lack of sleep.
By the time the salesman has finished with his helpful explanation, I have made my decision: I have decided I have no idea what he’s talking about.
So I e-mail my 30-something stepson and tell him what I understand, what I don’t understand and what smartphone features I would use most often. He suggests that I get a Princess phone.
He’s probably right.
There’s no sense having a phone that’s smarter than I am.
Contact D.L. Stewart at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com
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