How do you live with your smart telephone?

[otherego]

Oh, alright. I'll try to bring myself to refer to the things as "smartphones." My little friend, the 'phone. Ugh.

Double ugh.

For more than forty years, I've loathed and despised telephones. They've brought far more bad news and annoyance than pleasure or value to my life.

It's been practically impossible to do without them for a long time, though. The development of cheap answering machines has been of huge benefit to me. Turn the volume on the machine (and the ringer) off, check rarely, and ignore the vast majority of messages. Most are unimportant or irrelevant by the time I notice them.

And like Christmas cards, if you ignore those ringing you long enough then so, after a while, do they give up on trying to contact you.

A fine thing.

I honestly can't remember when I last actually answered my telephone.

Cool beans.

Enter the cellular telephone.

It suddenly became theoretically possible for people to annoy and upset you even away from home/work.

Yet the Dark Forces of Marketing convinced folk that they couldn't live without these intrusive monstrosities.

Even I have carried one for ages now. I'm  a) a hypocrite and  b) a wimp. It's nice to think one might be able to summon assistance if needed. I've actually used it twice to contact the emergency services to assist other folk. When I'm wheezing along on a bicycle ride, I carry a telephone and a taxi fare.

(Yes, of course it's always in "Silent mode" with the answer service disabled. Need you ask?)

Then the smartphone came along.

This appealed. A pocket computer which allowed convenient internet access out of the house? Good stuff. I looked into it.

I've now tried three - in chronological order, a Windows, Ubuntu and Android smartphone. And probably needless to say, the very cheapest I could find.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to turn the telephone function off. The manufacturers seem reluctant to provide this facility, so it's back to good old "Silent Mode."

The other stuff they do is ... fun. Cameras. Browsers. WhatsApp is my family's preferred means of communication, and works brilliantly. (Just not on the Ubuntu smartphone.) I don't do Facebook, which hopefully minimises problems there.

"Telegram" might be the way forward - it works on the Ubuntu gadget. Not quite as easy as WhatsApp (and you have to enable encryption when you want it), but still.

Trouble is, they all seem determined to slurp your personal information. Once you've logged into the Windows or Ubuntu "shop," you can't log out without a full factory reset.

I believe Android is similar (sorry, more later.)

Surely it's easier for people to follow what you're doing when you're logged in to their system?

Privacy-wise - smartphones stink.

Sorry.

It gets worse.

Security (not always totally compatible with privacy) seems to rely on using a system's own "app store." Which never, ever lets you log out.

This sucks.

My own strategy so far has been to make sure I use the gadgets for nothing important.

I flatly refuse to log in to the Google Play Store, relying instead on F-Droid to supply my needs. And perhaps the odd side-load (installing stuff from sources other than Google, which involves changing settings to allow stuff to be installed from "untrusted sources" or something.

Since when has Google been "trusted"????

Now - over to you - the reliable two or three who still follow this board.

How do you get full utility from your smartphone without compromising your privacy?

Which system do you like most? (This really hurts - my choice at the moment in terms of simple usability and useful software is Android, Windows, Ubuntu. The Ubuntu browser is virtually unuseable thanks to the lack of an ad-blocker. Aaaaaargh!)

And last but not least - how on earth do you carry the blimmin thing? My trusty dumbphones fitted into a shirt or jeans pocket, and if they fell out onto concrete, a) seemed to survive, once one reassembled them  b) cost little if they really got bent/soaked/flung.

[pixiesen2012]

simple,

I haven't got one and refuse point blank to get one!

I have a phone phobia and you won't get me within ten yards of the nasty things,

my trusty computer is all I need.

[otherego]

I cannot but empathise.

But I love gadgetry and I'd really like to try to get the best out of the ghastly things without them bleeding my personal information.

I'm after a mobile computer and outdoor internet device, to be honest - not a mobile telephone.

I don't have a telephone phobia. I just loathe and despise the beastly things.

[antipasta]

If you really refuse to have a mobile phone connection, you could get a data only sim for an appropriate portable device. May actually cost you more. Hoovering up your data is a fact of life with devices, os and apps, all you can do is limit it somewhat.

[angrydrag0n]

I was OK with phones until we moved up here and spent over 40 hours in phone boxes trying to sort out the landline!! I was seen in the blasted phone box so often I think I got a reputation. So now get a feeling of dread when the phone rings and will do anything to get out of answering it. 

I'm firmly on the low tech phone seat as well. Mines a £12 one which only feature is that its pink lol and tuck into a very small handbag, no camera, or anything. I'm not in the minority either. My supermarket phone payg service was apparently inundated with requests for talk and text only packages (no data) and so added it to the options.

I have got a tablet ( which is still a sore subject with OH who bought it for me) but its not been very successful. Apart from the lack of keyboard ( I'm a typist and can type as fast as I chat so going back to 2 fingers is like wading through treacle).

I initially got excited about the free apps, like the bar code scanner, night sky view etc but came to a grinding halt when the app store demanded a credit card on file - apparently because free apps have in app purchases available and it was for my convenience (no it wasn't I had absolutely no intention of buying anything). I only put my cc on file in places that I regularly need to pay.  so thats as far as I got. I did look into prepaid cc cards (not sure if the app store would accept them anyway) but even the best of the bunch charged a set fee to top up unless you set it up with the bank account so ground to a halt again.:(

[otherego]

One of the best things about the low tech mobiles is that they don't become the repository of all sorts of stuff you'd hate to lose. It also costs little when one leaves the thing on a train, or drops it into the bath.

I do like mobile data, as it allows me to use the internet when I'm away from a convenient wifi source. Because I won't log into Google Play Store, though, I can't be too trusting of the "apps" I install - which means absolutely no vaguely sensitive stuff at all.

As anti suggests, it might be feasible to go for a tablet with an expensive data-only sim.  At the moment, I'll live with a simple smartphone. The reason for this is that I thought the only pocket-sized tablet I ever found was, to put it kindly, not very usable. (It didn't have a sim card, either.)

The data slurping is a major problem of our time and although it's probably a losing battle, I'm determined to try to limit it. It's mostly harmless and sometimes (possibly) even beneficial, but I just loathe it.

I'm intrigued about the insistence on an app store demanding a credit card on file. Was it an Apple device? Pretty off-putting, and I assume that adding even a pre-paid card (which at the moment is what I use on-line, including eBay) would necessitate using one's real name.

And I think that's what I want - something genuinely portable but which respects my privacy without having to resort to online aliases, yet remains secure. And security and privacy aren't always compatible.

Then there remains the problem of lugging the thing around. I really don't think I'm ready for this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38527350

[*scyllabub*]

I "graduated" from Samsung's Galaxy S3 and Note II Android phones to a Windows phone, thinking it would be less cluttered and easier to navigate.  But smartphones of any breed are a technology too far for me, I've only got to look at them and I activate something unintentionally, and you'd think I had the fattest fingers on earth (far from it, in fact), given the difficulty I have with the keyboards.

Then there's the miserable battery life!  What the heck is running in the background eating up my resources?!  Don't advise me on this, I've tried and tried to get on top of it.

Besides the Windows phone I've got a Galaxy Note 8 "phablet", and I pay a monthly GiffGaff contract on each, which they keep telling me to reduce because I hardly use either of them.

But what if I get carted into hospital? 😮  I have to be able to keep in touch with my birds!

[cee-dee]

Depending on which Windows phone you've got..... the battery life is appalling. It also needs to be on charge for absolutely ages to get it fully charged.