The Bright Side of Cell Phones

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-newer podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we're looking at the bright side of things. This episode, we are going to look at cell phones. Yes, cell phones are just about attached to us at this point. Most of us carry them around all the time. Probably go to sleep with them if it's not right at the side of your bed. It's within reach. It's something that, you know, it's becoming a thing for sure. We see people all over the place that are heads down looking at their phone no matter what they're doing. When you're driving, there are laws now to keep people from being on their cell phone while they're driving. Now granted that it's a little more about them talking on it and being completely distracted that way, but we've also seen I think people that are heads down, they're not even really paying attention and they're checking something out on their phone. Particularly maybe not as much driving, but definitely we've all seen those situations where somebody is staring at their phone and they walk into somebody or the side of a building or something like that because it's just become completely a part of our life. Now there are definitely a long list of negatives in doing so and having anything that we spend that much time and give that much of our focus to, but there's some positives too. That's rather than rant about cell phones, as the season goes on and the focus of it, let's look at some of the good things about having that cell phone around. The first and really I think the primary goal of a cell phone when this first, I don't know, invented necessarily, but when we first decided to untether a phone from a landline is the ability to communicate from basically anywhere to anyone. Now this may seem like some ancient history to some of you, but actually we used to have problems dialing long distance and by problems I mean you got charged extra. You had your phone bill and then however much time you spent out there talking long distance that was tacked onto your bill. That is very rare to see that these days. Landlines if you actually still have one, I think all work under that plan, but there's probably a lot of those plans now that are where they include long distance as just part of the monthly bill. Cell phones definitely that just disappeared. Think about it now, I think most places it's going to cost you if you're going to do an international call. That's the way it used to be if you wanted to call outside of your area code, which sometimes was not that far away. You could call, depending on where you're at and how your things were set up, you could call a classmate in high school or grade school. They may actually be in a different dial long distance to get to them, to talk to them, but that's just a billing and cost issue. More importantly, it's sometimes hard to believe and hard to remember that there was a time when like if you were in your car going somewhere, you couldn't talk to anybody unless they were in the car with you. I guess you could yell at the other drivers who were going by, but generally speaking, you weren't going to talk to anybody unless they were in the car with you. You couldn't call and say, hey, I'll be running five minutes late or while you're sitting in traffic, catch up with somebody. None of that was available. And of course, all of those are positives. We now have the ability pretty much at the drop of a hat to call somebody up and say, hey, how you doing? This is something that was a big deal before. You had to actually go to that person's house or be somewhere where there was a phone. You didn't have a phone with you. If you got in an accident, if something happened, you got a flat tire and you pulled your car to the side of the road, you had to either wait for somebody to pick you up and take you somewhere or start walking. You couldn't call for help. And if you did, in order to call for help, you had to get to a phone. So it's a huge positive to not have to worry about that anymore. If you're a parent, then you have kids. If you're a manager and you've got coworkers, if you've got people that you either, for some reason, personally or professionally, need to keep track of or be able to communicate with at very flexible times, cell phones are huge for that. I don't know how many times professionally we've gone out to lunch and people check their cell phone or they get a call and it's like, hey, something's gone wrong. You need to come back. We've got an emergency to deal with. Or there's not really an emergency, but there's a meeting or there's something going on that that person would not have been able to go to lunch if it wasn't for the fact they had their cell phone and they can check in. They can give a call and say, hey, how did it work? This is just, at this point, we're just basically just hutching on the idea of smartphones. Let's go ahead and step into the positive of smartphones because those are really why we have such a focus on this device. It was, people walked around and they talked when it was just a phone, but adding the internet and apps and all these other things that we've got on our phone made it, again, a whole world of difference. There's a very minor thing to add a cell phone. It was a huge thing to add smartphones to the world. Now there are probably thousands if not millions of individual and specific instances. We'll keep it at a high level and group some things together at this point just because otherwise we could do an entire season on just these specific things, maybe multiple seasons on specific things and the value they bring. The first one is really let's just do the big group of an entertainment item. Whether you play games, whether it's reading news for entertainment, let's not talk about the professional stuff and things like that, watching videos, listening to audio or podcasts, watching movies. As an entertainment device, it's just amazing. It still is mind boggling when you really think about it that you can, wherever you are, watch a movie. You can go watch Avengers Infinity War in the bathroom in the middle of who knows where. It could be the middle of the Sahara Desert where maybe you don't have good connectivity there, but you can always store the thing on your phone. You could be watching it in the middle of nowhere. Of course, it's included with this, the whole ability to have this thing work in a disconnected state. You can be, as my kids did a year ago, you can be sitting in a line at Disney World for the two hours plus waiting to ride the Avatar ride and watch an entire movie while you're in the line. You could sit there and just happily not lose time as much as you used to. In the past, if you're sitting in a line for two hours, you're sitting in a line for two hours. Another good example, I was at DMV. Actually, that may have been where I came up with this idea for this episode. I was at the Department of Motor Vehicles sitting there so that we could get a driver's license and go through a driver's test and go through all the paperwork and everything. It was a full day and their computer systems went down at some point. What was normally a long wait was a longer wait. I'm in a room with probably 30, 40, 50 other people depending, I'm not sure because we're packed in pretty good. It was amazing how many people were sitting on their phone, they were doing emails, they were talking to people, watching a movie. This is time that would have been complete dead time in most cases, even 15, 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago. Now, that's time that's not really as big a loss. We can sit around and wait in a situation like that and it doesn't really impact our day as much. I mean, there's some things, obviously there's obvious things we have to do, but we can move our schedule around and we've talked about this. We can move around what we're doing and we can have these dead times become, we can bring them back to life. We can actually be incredibly productive during these times. Instead of taking a nap on a long drive, you can crack open your phone and get some work done. Now, you can also, laptop and things like that. I know you may need a different device, but you can also just watch a movie. Instead of that time being spent sitting on your couch at home and maybe not doing something that's not going to be productive. We can do it while we're on the road when it really doesn't have the same cost as far as time is concerned. We have the ability to do things like binge a series on Netflix because we may be sitting around long enough. We've got that kind of time or that time that really isn't necessarily, it's not really wasting time at that point because it's time that we weren't going to be that productive anyways. We adjust and instead of having a zero productivity period of time, we actually can knock something off our to-do list or we can entertain ourselves and catch up on news or media or whatever that otherwise we would not have been able to. Now the good, probably the largest swing, I guess, is a good and bad thing for cell phones that we're starting to see. Now in particular, just depending on who you're asked, we're maybe towards the end of or in the middle of the COVID stuff of 2020. One of the things that is a way to deal with this is tracking and tracing. A huge factor of that is cell phones because basically, especially smartphones, I think all of them now, if not most of them, have some sort of an internal device, a GPS, so they can, they've got some positional information so the phone effectively can know where it is at any given time. Now the original, I guess, intent or product that was marketed with this was mapping. So since the phone knows where it is, it knows where you are because you are holding the phone and it allows you to tell you, it gives you the opportunity through mapping and things like that to say this is how you get from where you are to where you want to be. Huge, huge positive. And actually, the tracking side of it, because the phone knows where you are, other people can know where you are. There's a huge plus to that. We can find, if you leave your phone in your car, you can find your car. If you've got a spouse or a family member or something like that that you want to track down and they've got their phone, you can find out where they are. So if somebody's kidnapped, if you've got a child that wanders off, if you've got an elderly person that wanders off, then sometimes that cell phone is going to allow you to track that person down. Now it's also going to allow the tracking of the path you take, which while it can be, there's obviously privacy concerns and things of that nature, it's actually pretty cool as well. You can use it along with the Apple health stuff or Fitbit and you can see what was that running path that you took that was so awesome? What was that bike path you took? How far did you go and how does that maybe work into your daily, weekly routine? If you want to do a five mile run and a 10 mile run through the day, through the week, or through the day if you're that kind of person, you can take a look at some of the paths you've taken and say, oh yeah, here's like a really good five mile path that I took. Oh, here's a really good 10 mile circuit. Now it used to be we would run those things or walk them off or whatever we needed to do to get a good idea for the distance we traveled. Now, keep that cell phone with you, and I know it could be a smart device as well, but you do it with your cell phone and you can sit there, you got a nice little picture of where you went and how far it was and of course you can track other stuff about it as well. We have now the ability to know much more precisely where we are and it's huge. We have the ability to know where we want to go. Think about things like Uber and Lyft. A lot of those drivers, part of their kit or whatever is a GPS so they know how to go from point A to point B, from wherever they pick you up to wherever you need to be dropped off. If you didn't have cell phones, you wouldn't be able to do that. Actually, if you didn't have cell phones, it would be a lot more difficult to call an Uber or a Lyft. It's particularly smartphones because now they know where you're at. You can go in and say, I need to get to wherever and you don't have to tell them where you're at. The phone can tell them where you're at so they can go there and say, boom, there you go. If you're talking to somebody, you could be sitting there talking to somebody on your phone and looking at the map, especially if you've got some sort of tracking with them. So between the two of you, you can head towards each other and not miss each other. It's huge for parents and kids with whatever they do because now you can let your kid, you can drop them off at a sports practice and have them call you when they're done. They don't have to go find a phone. I vaguely remember doing that as a child. We had to actually go find like, where's the phone in the building or at the end of school if something happened. I remember there being long lines at the phone so everybody could call their parents and say, hey, pick us up early or pick us up late or whatever the message was going to be. You didn't have this, you didn't even have robo calls, which is a different thing, but you didn't have that opportunity to just grab that phone out of your pocket and say, hey, I'm going to be late. Hey, can you pick me up early? Hey, I'm going to go down the street. Can you pick me up there instead of where you normally pick me up? The ability to get to where we want to be quickly and more directly is probably an uncountable literally amount of time that we've gotten back. We have no idea how often people got lost, people took a longer path to get where they needed to than possible, and they wasted time there. Another good example from the apps and the productivity is you've got these things, goes back to GPS, you have things like Waze. It will dynamically tell you the fastest way to get from where you are to where you need to be. This communication, this ability to know where we are and how to get where we want to go both physically and then also when you think of the informational apps that are out there. We can check the news at any time. We can listen to a podcast. We can read a blog. We can go check out a news site of whatever type of news we want to check out. We can stay informed all the time if we want to. We have things to help us do everything. Instead of carrying books around, we can have e-books. Instead of paper and pencil and stuff like that, we've got all kinds of note-taking apps and productivity apps and things like that. While a cell phone may suck some of the life out of our life, it may make us automated or whatever the naysayers may say, whatever the wording is, however you want to look at it, there is a huge amount of benefits that come from these devices as well. I think the most valuable way is that these things can save us time. They can allow us to make better use of our time. The time is the one thing that we cannot get back. You can't buy time. You can spend money so that you are maybe not spending as much time. You're spending more money doing something as opposed to spending more time doing something. There's stuff like that. But other than that, you can't get it back. The better you use it at the end of the day, at the end of your life, that's going to be, I would think for most of us, a good measure of how we lived it. That gives us to, boy, that makes it that heavy thing of, okay, let's not waste any more time than we need to. Let's think about that challenge of the week. Let's look at, while you're standing in line somewhere waiting for something, what are your three go-to apps or uses of your cell phone? Because you know you do it. You know you reach for your cell phone. If you're sitting there, you're in line, nothing else going on, you're going to reach for it. What are your top three uses? This would be a fun one to throw out there in the comments. It'd be really interesting to see. Give us some feedback. It'd be really interesting to see what people do and how they use their phones. Whether it's A and B specific or not, if you go and jump on Candy Crush, then it'd be interesting to see. Obviously, based on stats, a lot of people do. So it'd be interesting to see how people do that. More for your benefit, when you look at those three, do any of those actually add to your productivity? Do they allow you to make, we'll call it smarter or better use of your time while you're waiting? And that being said, let's go out there and make a great use of this day ahead of us and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. One more thing before you go. Developineur Podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, be great if you go out to developineur.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. So you can go back and have yourself a great day. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developineur Podcast. 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