A year on, I look at the other things around the cheap-phone space. I only paid $300 for my Moto X in 2014, so any replacement Android device needs to be no more than that. And the thing is…it’s not there. Nothing else at that price point has an AMOLED display AND has NFC AND takes the same size SIM care AND comes in at a comfortable one-hand size. Never mind the crapsack cameras that come with Androids at that price point or the virtual guarantee that you’ll never see more than one major OS upgrade (if that). Sure, it seems nice to have the promise of a 4000 mAh battery(!) in the Moto C Plus, or completely unbranded Android in the Nokia 5 (hopefully with the fit and finish we expected of our old pals from Espoo), but there’s always some kind of compromise.
And then there’s the iPhone SE which I bought cash on the barrelhead last year for $500. Although in a way it was actually kind of free, because it was completely paid for by my share of the court settlement over Apple, Google, etc conspiring to restrain employee movement. In any event, it was the first cell phone I put on a credit card of my own since 2014, and only the second since 2010. So it had to be something special to make it worthwhile, especially since the iPhone 6s was the first iPhone I found less desirable than its predecessor.
After one year of use, the SE has proven to be special indeed. I have bopped back and forth between phone cases, and I’ve still pulled out the Moto X on nights or off-days when I needed to be more fully detached without giving up connectivity altogether (read: I want to see Instagram and I might get a Slack message from Kazakhstan). And I still greatly prefer to use my Kindle Paperwhite for reading, because the SE’s display is indeed a little narrow for everyday use (but serviceable in a pinch). But after a year of everyday use, I took the phone to an Oakland A’s game last weekend, and never needed to pull out the external battery despite six hours of Slack, Instagram, text messaging, taking pictures, paying for beer and generally carrying on out and about with friends.
It fits in a pocket. It fits in one hand. It plays nicely with the car’s integrated CarPlay console or with my new Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones (and I can walk to the fridge and back at work, leaving the phone on my desk, and be just fine). It took a prepaid EE SIM in London and was just as useful on every frequency band as in the US, and it took a prepaid T-Mobile SIM in San Jose and gave me top signal at a California League baseball game and a fishing boat off Santa Cruz. It takes amazing 12 MP pictures that no point-and-shoot I’ve ever owned would take. It has NFC for payments and a fingerprint reader to unlock it, it works for airplane tickets and baseball tickets and concert tickets alike. And because it came out in the spring of 2016, it probably has a good three years of OS updates ahead of it.
And this one doesn’t belong to work, and isn’t locked to a carrier, and isn’t hobbled by a contract. This phone is all mine, stem to stern, and I could quit work tomorrow and pop my T-Mob SIM in there and carry right on until I settled on a long-term deal with them or with Cricket to carry me forward for less per month than I ever paid before abandoning my own AT&T foundation account in 2012. I can wait for phone makers to come around to the fact that yes, there are people who want something that doesn’t need a purse, and not everyone needs a 5-inch display.
Two phones I’ve bought since 2010. Neither has ever given me any reason to regret them.