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Showing posts with label smartphone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label smartphone. Show all posts

Saturday, December 09, 2017

New Life!


Praise be!  Behold, my telephone hath been restored unto me!

The language used for that last sentence fits the sense of renewed faith that comes with being plugged into whatever electronic systems I have been missing over the Days of Isolation through which I have had to live.  And please do not say that the 38 euro thing that I bought to ‘tide me over’ did anything so much.  To be fair I am astonished by just how much such a cheap phone was able to accomplish, but it wasn’t my faithful old Yotaphone.

It was given back to me this morning; some sort of chip having been replaced and it is now in full working order.  Except . . . .

Except, while the phone works, some things are missing.  Like all the apps that I added and the photos stored (I assumed) somewhere or other on the sim or in the cloud, somewhere, anywhere.

It’s a bit like beginning to walk again.  You progress step by step.  You have your basic phone and a lot of space on the main page where lots of little icons used to lurk.  Some of the replacements were easy to decide on: Reverso (my translation app); The Guardian (once a Guardian reader always a Guardian reader); Radio 4 (to question the need for this one argues that you wouldn’t understand the answer and that you were a poltroon); WhatsApp (people send things and they expect me to read them, and I do try, honestly!).  Other apps will be found when I need them, or to put it in the way that Toni described it, “You’ll get them when you find they aren’t there!”  Which is almost philosophical and probably counts for a lot of the time spent on computers as we try and find what isn’t there.

In the bad old days (I now understand that means anything over 5 years ago), no, the really bad old days when there was no internet, no wi-fi and virtually not on-board memory, you really did have to search for things that you thought that you had done, but you had made a tiny mistake in the file name or file type or where you put it and it was well and truly gone.  Like the books in the British Library that I was told had a shelf number as their identifying place in the system, which meant that if a book was replaced incorrectly then there was a real chance that it would never be found again, except by pure chance!  Sometimes it felt with early computers that, whatever we were told about the cold logic of our machines, they were actually motivated by a malevolent maliciousness that works ceaselessly against us.

So with my revived phone.  It felt as if things had been intentionally hidden.  For example the photographs I had taken.  On the photo app on the phone there were no ‘taken’ photographs, all the photos had gone.  Somewhere.  And, sure enough, over the next few hours, I found a photo, and then a whole slew of photos emerge from the electronic mists and retake their places.  They are there, but I don’t seem to be able to access them from the camera.  That too will change, I’m sure.

And, a I’ve been typing, I have realized that there is another app that I can’t do without, that of Kindle.  This is the app that uses the second face of my phone, so that I can read easily in black and white, and in the sunshine too.  And even as I type it is syncing my information and all my books are now only a touch away!

Everyone should go through the trauma of ‘losing’ their phone, if only for the delight and satisfaction in ‘restoring’ a life!