plinka hawwww

So here we go. The new-old-stock iPhone SE (code name “Side Piece” and loaded with iOS 11.3) arrived and has been set up on yet another SIM from US Mobile (your absolute best bet for minimal-usage low-cost SIM service). I successfully dumped my entire music library to it and still have room left over, which is nice, but the real appeal to having a 128 GB phone is that if I do have to relinquish my work phone, all I have to do is restore its iCloud backup to the SE and I’m good to go.

I didn’t restore from the backup of the old SE, of course. This was a clean setup, and the only apps I put on there are all for audio streaming or facilitating going down the pub. No social media (other than Signal, if you count that), no Slack or other work apps, and not one byte of code from Google or Facebook (I did install the Kindle app, but only because one of my Siri shortcuts calls it and I didn’t want it to break; this isn’t a reading device). I didn’t even put an RSS reader on there. Given that Slack, Insta and Twitter usually are among my top-5 battery burners, I’m hoping this phone’s battery life will be appreciably better.

Not least because, quite frankly, I didn’t want an app for anything I can do on a web browser. Refreshing Twitter and RSS don’t tend to make my life any better. Slack isn’t terrible on a personal level, but it’s also the worst battery hog you can put on your phone short of the Facebook app itself. If I want the Gaelic-language version of RTE radio, or BBC4 for the shipping forecast, or minor-league baseball audio streaming, those are fine, but with all the iTunes songs local I can pop it into airplane mode and survive for days between charges. 

But for most daily use, even on the weekends, I’m going to try to live on my iPhone X. Water-resistant, a screen that lets you use it as a Kindle, haptic vibration, big battery (even if the AMOLED screen chews through it, you can at least ameliorate that slightly with dark modes), better cameras front and back, wireless charging, and it’s got all the bits and bobs on it for work so I can actually do my job from it sometimes. And hopefully if I go back to setting up and using Downtime, I’ll actually be able to wall off the bits I don’t need to be overdosing on. And when I pull out the SE, it’ll be because I really am getting away from it all, and hopefully for more than just an hour and a half.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.