So here we go. The new-old-stock iPhone SE (code name \u201cSide Piece\u201d 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\u2019m good to go.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t restore from the backup of the old<\/em> 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\u2019t want it to break; this isn\u2019t a reading device). I didn\u2019t even put an RSS reader on there. Given that Slack, Insta and Twitter usually are among my top-5 battery burners, I\u2019m hoping this phone\u2019s battery life will be appreciably better.<\/p>\n Not least because, quite frankly, I didn\u2019t want an app for anything I can do on a web browser. Refreshing Twitter and RSS don\u2019t tend to make my life any better. Slack isn\u2019t terrible on a personal level, but it\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n But for most daily use, even on the weekends, I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u2019ll actually be able to wall off the bits I don\u2019t need to be overdosing on. And when I pull out the SE, it\u2019ll be because I really am<\/em> getting away from it all, and hopefully for more than just an hour and a half.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So here we go. The new-old-stock iPhone SE (code name \u201cSide Piece\u201d 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 … <\/p>\n