This is more philosophical than practical, but here goes anyway. I’ve been fiddling around with both phones lately. I took them both to Santa Cruz over the weekend, where the Moto X on T-Mob was far better at getting signal than the iPhone on AT&T. Then I took the iPhone alone to San Francisco, without even bringing headphones. I bled it down to 13% before getting home, but the picture-taking was far superior. (No surprises there.)
It’s funny that at some level, my brain is still thinking “I need just one device” when from 2007 to 2012, that’s exactly what I had, barring the occasional loan of an original iPad. Granted, it was kind of a PITA during the iPhone 3G era, but battery issues notwithstanding, I never felt the need for more than the iPhone 4 could offer me. The one caveat is that reading Kindle content is much easier on a bigger display, but the 4.7” screen of the Moto X or iPhone seems to be a lot better than the 3.5” window the iPhone sported those five years. Plus having the AMOLED screen on the X and using white text on a black background instinctively sounds like a battery fix.
I’m still thinking in terms of what happens if I take control of my own phone again rather than being provided one by work. The question I have at this point is how long I could get by on a Moto X before breaking down. The Pebble works a lot better with the X, no question, and I could either go with the T-Mobile option for $30 a month or go with Cricket for $45 (T-Mob only offers 100 minutes, while Cricket caps data at 8 Mbps, but both offer 5 GB data and unlimited messaging.) In the back of my mind, the prospect of being able to hit up work for reimbursement and only pay $5 a month out of pocket might be worth the feeling of taking my phone back for myself. Which seems foolish on the face of it, but I don’t know what to tell you. These things aren’t rational.
And to make matters worse, the Apple Watch is starting to look attractive for the first time. I’m increasingly fed up with the Pebble – on iOS, it has a tendency to lose the Bluetooth connection randomly, and the sleep monitoring functionality is erratic. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch would add in the ability to reply to texts, to do voice-based messaging and search, provide much more granular control over the music (the Pebble gives you nothing you don’t get from the headphone controls; I want to switch playlists) and the ability to acknowledge and dismiss two-factor authentication notifications at work. A little monitoring with an app shows that there are about 30 times a day where I pull the phone out of my pocket and use it for a minute or less; those are all incidents that could be as easily sorted off the watch once version 2 arrives. Of course, this all assumes I commit to the Apple ecosystem for good…something about the watch seems like an extra level of commitment to the iPhone that I don’t really feel at the moment.
And then there’s the iPad…I have a sneaking suspicion that our inevitable future is the 6-inch phablet. When even Apple can’t produce a mainline phone with a display smaller than 4.7 inches, and when nobody but Apple can produce a viable tablet while instead throwing their resources into ever-larger phone screens, it looks like the inevitable future pocket computer terminal is something along the lines of the Nexus 6, one device to rule them all and you just have to carry a purse anyway. Which is basically the use case for the smartwatch: critical stuff on the arm so you don’t have to pull out your Samesung [sic] Leviathan every time you get a text. And it may sound risible that we’ve reached the point of needing a remote control for your phone, but let’s be honest: it stopped being a phone in anything but name about the time the iPhone 4 dropped.
So there’s that. And yet, the whole idea of the ubiquity of the phone is definitely a 21st-century thing. As has been said elsewhere, half of Seinfeld episodes break down in a world with pervasive cellphones, so some sort of switch flipped around 1999. Not very long after the switch flipped on pervasive internet access, which in my mind is still right around 1995-96. There’s a nodal point there when the very nature of mass communication changes, and there’s something to think about there…but not today.