Smart Phones Require Smart People

Sure, it’s a smart phone.

I don’t think the name is wrong, so much as how the name is understood. If you are smart, you can get this gadget to do a lot of really cool stuff. But until you’ve smartened up a little bit, it can be a real pain in the…

Let me give you an example.

My new Samsung Galaxy Rugby LTE will sync all of my contacts from both of my G-Mail accounts as well as Facebook, Twitter, and I’m sure anything else that collects phone numbers/email addresses/handles and images.

Great concept — everyone I might want to get in touch with all in one place. It’s when the concept meets reality that the smart exposes the stupid.

See, I’ve never been good at culling my contacts lists. G-mail auto-fills my address bar, so I don’t really care if it’s cluttered with addresses I don’t use. And I thought it was great to have G-mail auto-save everyone I had ever sent a message to, or replied to in my contacts list. More auto-filled addresses!

Then I synced to my smart phone, and I had to scroll through 27 “info@” and 13 “unsubscribe@” contacts to find what I was looking for. I also had six different contacts for my wife and five different versions of Adam Gerle. That one sticks out because it is always the top of the alphabetized list.

I had to get smart (see, the phone made me smarter) and clean up my cluttered contact list.

Then there is the Play Store for us Android users. There is not a solution to every problem in the store; there is a long list of solutions to every problem in the store. The challenge — and here you have to be smart again — is to do a bit of research to figure out which solution matches your problem.

Apple i-devices have a great music player, but the native Android player is not great — a problem in search of a solution.

I found an unbelievable number of music players for my phone. I narrowed down the selection to seven or eight by reading reviews and then settled on one I liked that didn’t cost too much.

You have to be careful, it’s never free. If it seems free it’s going to have problems; you always get what you pay for. The one I’ve got works great, and the trial period still hasn’t expired, so I don’t even have to grumble about the cost (yet).

My favourite solution is how I solved the poor cell reception in our basement. Reception in the basement is important because that is where my office is. Not receiving calls while at my desk became a problem. I found a little gadget on-line that connects to my cell phone through the BlueTooth, and will connect to my phone lines within the house. This means a call received on my cell, will ring through on the phone in my house.

Brilliant!

Except, I would not get my text messages, because my phone would be upstairs and I’d be downstairs.

Crap!

Enter MightyText. I loaded that up on my computer and my phone and now not I get all of my texts on my computer, and my desktop will tell me if my phone charge is getting low, and I can get those texts on my tablet as well.

Brilliant, again!

I’ve been smart enough to get this phone to do some cool things, even though I still can’t get the video working on my Skype account.

Next on the agenda?

If I’m really lucky I’ll talk Google into sending me a set of Google Glasses to review, but while I’m asking about that, I also want to see if they are looking for people to test a Google Ocular Implant. I’m always losing my glasses; it would just be easier that way.

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