This is more philosophical than practical, but here goes anyway. I\u2019ve 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.)<\/p>\n
It\u2019s funny that at some level, my brain is still thinking \u201cI need just one device\u201d when from 2007 to 2012, that\u2019s exactly<\/em> 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. \u00a0The one caveat is that reading Kindle content is much easier on a bigger display, but the 4.7\u201d screen of the Moto X or iPhone seems to be a lot better than the 3.5\u201d window the iPhone sported those five years. \u00a0Plus having the AMOLED screen on the X and using white text on a black background instinctively sounds like a battery fix.<\/p>\n I\u2019m 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. \u00a0The 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<\/em> be worth the feeling of taking my phone back for myself. Which seems foolish on the face of it, but I don\u2019t know what to tell you. \u00a0These things aren\u2019t rational.<\/p>\n And to make matters worse, the Apple Watch is starting to look attractive for the first time. I\u2019m 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. \u00a0Meanwhile, 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\u2019t get from the headphone controls; I want to switch playlists) and the ability to acknowledge and dismiss two-factor authentication notifications at work. \u00a0A 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. \u00a0Of course, this all assumes I commit to the Apple ecosystem for good\u2026something about the watch seems like an extra level of commitment to the iPhone that I don\u2019t really feel at the moment.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the iPad\u2026I have a sneaking suspicion that our inevitable future is the 6-inch phablet. When even Apple can\u2019t 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. \u00a0Which is basically the use case for the smartwatch: critical stuff on the arm so you don\u2019t have to pull out your Samesung [sic] Leviathan every time you get a text. \u00a0And it may sound risible that we\u2019ve reached the point of needing a remote control for your phone, but let\u2019s be honest: it stopped being a phone in anything but name about the time the iPhone 4 dropped.<\/p>\n So there\u2019s that. \u00a0And 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. \u00a0Not very long after the switch flipped on pervasive internet access, which in my mind is still right around 1995-96. \u00a0There\u2019s a nodal point there when the very nature of mass communication changes, and there\u2019s something to think about there\u2026but not today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is more philosophical than practical, but here goes anyway. I\u2019ve 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 … <\/p>\n