Phones kind of suck

It is a cloudy and very subtley foggy mid day. Felix is still alseep next to me, enjoying the best part of their day off.

Pixel Problems

I've been running a Google Pixel 2XL for the past year and a half as my daily driver, and only cellphone. It was great for the first year, while it was still a mainline flagship phone that ran all the programs at a steady framerate and lasted a day and a half of constant use.

Over time, as I charged and discharged the phone every day, took it out in the freezing cold and the scorching hot of a year's weather, and mobile devs started to expect more and more out of a phone's computational ability, and as the honeymoon period just wore off, my experience has instead shifted to frustration and annoyance.

Attempted Solutions

My intention since I got the phone was to get this thing to last as long as possible, but a lot of design decisions made by Google are making this harder said than done. I've found that one of the best things you can do to make an old phone new again is to just replace the battery. However, due to what I assume is a combination of waterproofing and anti-tinkering, the process of swapping this battery out requires a very delicate screen removal that not even phone repair shops can guaruntee they'll be able to do without cracking it. So that isn't really an option.

My next idea was to get a decently sized battery backup. A much weaker backup gave my first phone a real second wind that helped it to last much longer. However, over the past few months a new problem I had never seen before emerged. Something in the charging mechanism broke and now the thing shuts off every time it charges. If I wanted to go the route of the battery backup, it would only really be good for charging in place somewhere where I don't have outlet access anyway. In a time of pandemic like this one, that is a very rare scenario, so that wouldn't really help much at all.

Getting Away From It

Having my phone battery dead most of the time has given me an excuse to not have the thing on even when it is charged. I've been really enjoying this "feature" lately. It really makes me feel much more in control of how I respond to things happening in the world of my phone. Texts are now closer to emails to be checked on a regular schedule instead of interrupting whatever it was that I was doing to handle the demands of the flashing box.

On top of that, I can now walk around much more comfortably without needing to find a spot for the phone to sit. My pockets have never been lighter and my mind has never been clearer.

The phone has been dead for over twenty four hours by now, and those were perhaps the most calming twenty four hours of my life. It has been great.

Maybe when I finally upgrade in six months I'll try and keep up this new phone use habit and keep the much more laxed expectations from those sending me texts and messages.

Thanks for reading, have a great afternoon

-- Noah