The story of a reluctant Smartphone user

For years, I’ve said ‘no’ to smartphones. My friends had given up on me, calling me ‘old school’. My wife kept trying to convince me and I kept convincing her on why I didn’t need a smartphone. I would tell everyone including myself that I was not fascinated by the idea of a phone that needed to get smarter than my old Nokia touchphone was! A phone, I thought, was but a phone which was meant to make and receive calls, write messages and play music. I hated phone cameras despite all the jazzy stuff they’d write about how great those snaps would come out to be; I knew a camera had to be a camera and not a phone. So, there I was, happy and content in my non-smart world.

My wife already had a Samsung Galaxy S3: sleek, sexy, and – yes, of course – smart! She was glued to it. She’d play games for hours, write emails, play cool music, surf the internet, and chat with friends. She, in short, had the world at her finger tip. I, on the other hand, would occasionally look at her phone and less occasionally play a game of Temple Run! Some of my friends had the ‘ultimate’ phone, the iPhone, but that too couldn’t arouse that attraction in me. That was me.

As fate would have it, my long-standing companion, my Nokia touchphone, started showing signs of ageing. It would occasionally freeze in the middle of important conversations, and I faced other performance-related issues as well. That’s when I started asking myself, ‘Looks like, I’m soon going to be done with her. Should I consider buying a smartphone?’ A follow-up thought was, ‘But is it worth it? I’m not going to use a lot of phone apps, I wouldn’t play games, and I certainly don’t want to be overly accessible on chat groups all over the place?’ I would use my SLR camera for quality photographs and I had a laptop, good enough for my internet necessity. After some serious pondering, a third question also came up, ‘Well, why not turn smart, now that I’ve decided to buy my next phone?’

Suddenly I forgot about the grey hair on my head and decided to adopt a welcome change. Gone were the days of rigidity and conservatism; I was a reformed man ready to explore the world of smartphones. Boy, didn’t I do some good research – reading reviews, discussing with friends and so on? Didn’t I spend time on Flipkart and Amazon? Didn’t I start learning about the phones even before I bought one? Most of my friends however didn’t know that I was researching for my own future phone. When I knew I had done it all and I figured out the phone I wanted to buy, I settled for Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos, a big phone with decent specifications. The only turn off about the phone was its inbuilt memory (or lack of it) and the screen resolution, which could have been better, but struggled at times trying to support the 5-inch screen. 

So, here I am today, an ardent smartphone lover for whom this isn’t a mere device. This is a living and breathing companion that follows me everywhere I go, including the loo!