So I finally broke down and got a smart phone. Sort of.
The carrier that has given life to my 1998 flip phone these past few years runs a scheme where a few dollars of ‘loyalty credit’ from each bill goes towards purchasing your next phone. Since I haven’t gotten a new handset in ages they owed me enough for a shiny new smart phone albeit a very basic model. Shipping was free and it wasn’t going to cost me a penny so I let them send it. Their mistake.
Being the hermit that I am I rarely talk on the phone anyway and certainly don’t keep the blasted thing in my pocket all the time. I gave that up after the shop years and enjoy being delightfully out of contact. The only reason I bothered to get the smart phone now is because the Apple I-pod I had died about a month after its year warranty expired*. Remembering that I only got THAT gizmo because the buttons to control it were built into my car, I’ve been looking for a way to take audio books on the road and out to the farm ever since. Thus the smallest sliver of motivation to dive headlong into the smart phone world I generally loathe began to form in my brain.
* After inspecting inside a few of them, I can comfortably say that Apple products are complete crap from an engineering perspective. Designed to fail and keep you on the overpriced purchase treadmill. Never again in my house.
But here’s where my carrier’s evil plot to lure me into more phone use has backfired on them. That smart phone can load apps as most of you out there hooked on tiny pocket screens know. I’ve found one of many providers that gives me free VoIP (voice over internet protocol) calling as long as I’m near an open Wi-Fi router connection. That’s 100% of the time inside my house and most of the time I’m out and about thanks to free hotspots at net cafes and Tim Horton’s peppered about town. I’ve even noticed my grocery store has free Wi-Fi nowadays. I don’t want to call anyone when I’m in a moving vehicle and the included voice mail can collect any that come in for me to catch up later. Nothing I’m saying or hearing is so urgent that it can’t wait until I get home. We all did perfectly well with good old-fashioned answering machines until a decade or so ago when the marketing machine to convince everyone they needed such gizmos kicked into high social pressure gear. Yet another reason the outcast life can be such a joy.
Since by law in most places any mobile phone with power has to be able to dial emergency services (911 or 999) from a stranded roadside, I can rest easy that carrying what I call my ‘dumb phone’ with me is all I need and conveniently keeps my beloved audio books under my fingertips at the same time. I’m cancelling my subscription to ‘regular’ cell service and going forward using my spiffy new smart phone without any sort of SIM card installed at all. That also conveniently means no overpriced Canadian mobile bill gouging my pocket monthly.
You’re probably thinking “How do I get a phone number without a SIM?” Well spotted. In exchange for a few tiny adverts at the bottom of the phone screen when dialing, that free app gives me an assigned Canadian phone number*. Something my poor old Skype subscription has never been able to do. Skype blames Canadian regulations but most everyone agrees they just decided there wasn’t enough profit up here for them to jump through the hoops needed to get a pool of Canadian numbers to hand out. As a bit of a backup and because I like the elderly corded VoIP phone sitting on my desk for call quality, I’ll keep the half of my Skype subscription that gives me unlimited North American dialing out for a grand total of $30 per YEAR. Yep, $2.50 a month is my total outlay for communications with this little scheme. How’s that compare to your bill? What would you do with an extra six hundred bucks a year? Or is it more? Do you really need that electronic leash in your pocket ALL the time?
* For anyone outside Canada, there are probably several VoIP apps available to you with local number assignments but you’ll have to shop for them yourself. I know Google Voice offers free numbers and calling to the Americans but that’s the limit of my non-Canadian knowledge base on the topic.
For the record and to irritate the three fully-connected friends I have left, I still don’t text on the blasted thing. My texts are called ’emails’ and use complete sentences typed with all ten fingers. Similarly I don’t store contacts or phone numbers on there so the Google monster can’t vacuum up my address book and send spam in my name. I’ve disabled all the built-in android ‘phone the mother ship’ spyware and used blocking on the router so directed adverts can’t be pushed to the device. GPS, off. Bluetooth, off. Bat echo-location radar, off. Googlytube “what I’m doing right now in my kitchen” sensor-matic, off. It really is the dumbest smart phone around.
But here’s where the gripe of the day comes in. It seems most new mobiles, mine included, have an FM radio chip built into them. Handy for people out here in the sticks to listen to local stations whether for crappy pop music, news, or local emergency info during, say, bad weather if the cellular network goes down. But here’s the rub. The carriers have disabled that chip’s ability to function. Yep, you heard right. You’ve probably got all the technology you need in your pocket already but they’re blocking it from working properly. Just so you’ll have to use their expensive data plans and ‘stream’ over paid airwaves instead of catching the free local signals already surrounding us*. How lame is that? I’ve been able to ‘unlock’ my phone but still need the manufacturer/carrier cooperative to unleash the app that can drive the chip. Or for clever hackers to figure it out. Stay tuned on that front.
* You’d still have to stream for far-flung radio stations to satisfy your BBC World Service and Jamaican Dance Fever urges. FM stations here mean those in your local area, on average about 100km radius.
There’s a concerted effort both in the States and here in Canada to negotiate a solution to this problem as well. And it’s backed up by some heavy-hitting broadcasters like NPR and CBC who’ve had some successes down in America on this front. They’re trying to pressure all the cell phone carriers to unlock this FM functionality already in our hands. Check out their campaign sites below and take some action by calling or emailing your carriers and regulators today. It’s going to take a groundswell of support and some waves of bad publicity for them to alter their evil ways up here in slow-to-change Canada I suspect.
