Today is the last day I need to let myself get away with not writing to my goal word count. June was my worst month for writing since January. It was bad. I admit January was worse, since I ended that month in the hole. :D
I’ve been distracted for about two months now, starting about the time school let out for the year and my A/C stopped working, but instead of getting better after getting my A/C unit fixed, and the kids settling in for the summer, it’s gotten significantly worse this year.
It got even worse this week, with my beloved phone giving me significant trouble with some recent updates to Google services. I finally had to give up on it and migrate to a new phone.
Of course, I went out with my usual impulsiveness and bought a phone while I was stressed. :D
I paid for it, oh, boy did it. On Friday, I bought an LG V10. Cost me $710 and I liked it—it was an amazing little machine—but by Sunday afternoon, I was over it.
The battery lasted 3 hours on Saturday, and all I was doing was a bit of internet and email—no video at all. Then it took 5 hours to recharge. What?
I did some research on it, talked to the shop where I bought it, and did a factory data reset. At this point, I was anxious and irritated, because it was a new phone and I don’t like stress. I wasn’t doing much with the phone at all, so battery drain shouldn’t have been so significant—I even kept it in airplane mode for a while.
Overnight, the battery charged to a higher level and seemed set on Sunday to run for about twice as long as it had on Saturday. I needed that battery to last at least 12-14 hours, if not significantly longer. I was getting 6-8 hour estimates based on my Sunday morning usage. (Very light.)
So yeah, the factory data reset helped and the battery life improved, but not enough. Not by far.
At that point, I started to really consider all the other things about the phone that weren’t working out as I’d hoped. The 5.7″ display was beautiful, but I couldn’t hold it comfortably in the palm of my hand for very long. That massive display wasn’t much smaller than the display on my 6″ Fire, which I like to hold two-handed, but can’t really manage in one hand without cramping my hand. The LG V10 was entirely too much phone for my hand.
This made me realize something else: I actually like having a range of small, medium, and large devices to choose from depending on what I want to do, and I definitely like having at least one small device for reading because of my small hands. I’m short and my hands are sized appropriately. :) It was no fun holding that huge phone.
I don’t even want to know how much power that screen would use up during a reading binge—I didn’t get to test that. I read for about half an hour Saturday morning before I noticed how quickly the battery was draining. :o
Then there’s the $710. I looked up a few other phones online and realized I’d really missed how cheap smartphones had become. I found something comparable to my Droid X (only better* and newer, of course) for $70.
What?! Yeah. $70.
I took the LG V10 back. I had 14 days to make a return, and I decided Sunday afternoon that I’d overbought by a ridiculous degree, and that $710 was a ridiculous amount of money to spend only to be disappointed.
What this experience taught me was that I don’t need a flashy phone; I need a workhorse.
The only app that I really wanted on my Droid X that it couldn’t run was OneNote. I definitely needed a phone that could run newer apps, but… that was it. Any decent Android phone with the newer OS on it could do that.
So, I rethought my entire plan: no more thinking I needed the best phone I could find so I could ride out a long time on the same device, no more thinking I needed a replaceable battery so I could keep the phone working well as it got older. Smartphones are ridiculously cheap now and an upgrade at today’s prices just isn’t the big deal I’d imagined it would be. Only the top of the line smartphones are still pricey and I had fallen so far out of the loop I hadn’t even realized that. :o
I replaced the LG V10 with a cheap little Moto e with the intent to upgrade (if I want) after doing my damn research. Impulsiveness won’t win again on this issue. :D Lesson learned!
*Mostly better. In actuality, the camera is not better. Since I take so few photos, I decided I didn’t care. The phone was $70. Sadly enough, my impulsiveness cost me on this too, because I came home after buying the little Moto e and found it available on Walmart.com for $35! Holy crap.
The truth is, I’m remarkably satisfied with the phone even at $70. I like it. I hadn’t realized just how slow my Droid X had become. The Moto e is great for me and I’m thrilled I didn’t end up spending $710 + $70 sales tax after all.
Now, off to a fourth of July cookout! :D I’ll be back later to worry over the writing I’m going to have to do to make up for all the writing I didn’t do in June. :)