Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Tech Column: A Cell Phone Only Life?


by Bill Adler


How do you do it? For those of you who just have a cell phone and no landline, how do you manage that?

My iPhone and I have a good relationship. But my iPhone isn't my only phone. Embarrassing as it may be for somebody who's ubertech, I still have a landline. I keep my landline phone not for emergencies, for telemarketers, for better sound quality, or because it never runs out of battery power. I keep my landline because I still can't wrap my head around carrying my phone with me everywhere in my house.

I take my iPhone everywhere when I go outside. That's a given. In fact, my iPhone has its own support team that often accompanies it: A messenger bag that has extra battery power and other paraphernalia.

But carrying my iPhone from room to room is something that I'm simply not used to. When I come back home, my cell phone mates with its charger and there it stays until I go outside again.

This week's tech column has more questions than advice: If your only phone is your cell phone (or it's your 99 percent phone), do you carry it from room to room? If you do take it with you, do you wear it on your belt? Carry a bag at home? Keep it in your pocket? Do you forget sometimes to bring it to the bedroom after dinner? Do you often have to make a frenetic dash to another room when your phone rings? And finally, do you wish you had a landline?

I've thought about getting a cell phone dock that lets you connect cell phones to landline phones -- one like this: http://amzn.to/UGeTEV. I've thought about wearing a bluetooth headset at home (some are quite fashionable!) so I don't have to carry around the phone itself. But neither solution is as convenient as having multiple landline phones pre-positioned around the house.

What do you do? Do you like having a cell phone as your one phone?

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Bill Adler is the co-publisher of the Cleveland Park Listserv, www.cleveland-park.com. He is the author of "Boys and Their Toys: Understanding Men by Understanding Their Relationship with Gadgets," http://amzn.to/rspOft. He tweets at @billadler.



1 comment:

  1. I leave my cell phone in the charger at home and let the voicemail handle a lot of my calls. Of course the problem is that many of the people who call me do the same, and so we keep missing each other. I tend to text people when I want to be sure to make sure they hear from me.

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