Reliance on Technology

[Geffers]

Many things nowadays depend on a mobile app. Without a mobile everyday tasks can become an issue.

Newer phones seem to be allowing for this by way of larger memory, the norm nowadays seems to be 256GB whereas a few short years back it was 8GB or 16GB

Herein lays the problem, today I switched my spare phone on, not old, about 4/5 years old, been working fine, it now will not boot. Ten years ago this would have been a nuisance, not a major inconvenience. Now however, people have digital pay for credit cards, banking apps, apps to pay for parking fees. Who gets an insurance certificate now, it is all PDF and kept on phone. Boarding passes for air travel.

If your phone fails now it is not a nuisance, it can be a catastrophe, so what is the safeguard now? Two phones? I don't know the answer really.

In the old days if a shop till broke down out came a notebook and pencil, business carried on, nowadays an IT failure means no business takes place.

Maybe the old filofax was the best idea.

Geffers

 

[Crims]

This is absolutely true. I can't get by without two of everything - phones, controllers, and stuff like the lawnmower. It's like after the Blackberry and Facebook besides AI there's nothing new worth keeping track of. Arguably a lot of tech has come and gone, though if I put it in perspective, daily life is largely not meant for old people, people without phones and people who dislike technology. I'm up for having convenience, though the opposite is rarely taken seriously.

 

[Retro]

If your phone fails now it is not a nuisance, it can be a catastrophe, so what is the safeguard now? Two phones? I don't know the answer really.

It doesn't have to be a catastrophe with simple cloud backups. On the Android side use Google Drive and on the Apple side, iCloud. For both services, you'll have to pay something every month to get anything more than an extremely restricted, basic version of those services, but it's well worth it.

I don't know about Android nowadays, but switching to a new iPhone couldn't be easier. When setting it up for the first time (or after a factory data reset) simply log into your Apple account and tell it to restore from the backup. Wait a bit and it's job done, you've just cloned your setup onto the new phone without a hitch. All your passwords are there, apps and they're logged in, too. On top of that, if your old iPhone is still functional, there's an easy clone process that works just as seamlessly. That's what I used when I upgraded my iPhone recently. iPhones are expensive, but they work really well. No wonder they're so popular.

When I tried this with Android, it was a nightmare that eventually ended in failure. Note that we're talking 2015 here with Android 7 that was old even then, so it may have improved a lot by now, dunno, hope so.

 

[Geffers]

When I mentioned a catastrophe I meant at the time, yes, backup is easy, even on an android but at the time of failure, just supposing you were just going on a foreign holiday....

Geffers