An iPhone 6S with 64 GB of space, which I bought in October 2016, used, for less than 400€.
Before that, I had an iPhone 5S, 16 GB, which I had used for three years, until it broke.
Funny story: I bought it in Sydney on a trip the week it came out for 540€ from a lady who had bought the wrong model, so I could get a deal. Here’s one of the first pictures I took with it, from the Hilton Downtown Sydney, overlooking Hyde Park.
At the next stop of the trip, Seoul, I had a screen protector put on it in a tiny store, even though the phone hadn’t even come out there yet. The lady looked slightly puzzled.
The reason I haven’t tried to fix the 5S is…
Before that, I had an iPhone 4, 16 GB, which I had used for three years, until it broke.
It died on my trip to Sri Lanka in 2013, when, on the last day, I laid on it to keep it from overheating at the beach – bad idea. It was protected from sun, but not from my sweat.
When I returned home, the earpiece was broken, as was the speaker, as was the screen and the battery. I had bought the phone in 2010 when it came out via a French co-worker of my dad, to get a deal, for just under 700€.
I thought putting in 50€ to fix it would be a good investment. So I bought spare parts and a friend even helped me install them. But the parts failed and the phone remained useless.
The lessons I’ve learned from my first 3 smartphones are:
- Use them until they break.
- When they break, don’t fix them.
- Buy used if you can, and if you can’t, get a deal anyways.
With each new smartphone, I’m becoming a bit smarter in how I use them.
- The phones I buy keep getting better, yet I’m paying less and less for them.
- The time from broken phone to new phone is reduced with each replacement.
- The way I use them has gone from downloading every game and fancy app to the bare essentials, the things I need to do to get work done: phone, email, messages, research, documenting on social media.
When I first started using my latest one, I had just started posting daily to my Instagram story. One of the first uploads I made was a picture of the new phone that said: “Hello, new tool.”
Even a smartphone can only be as smart as the person who’s using it. A smartphone does a dumb person no good. To the contrary.
What phone you use doesn’t matter. What matters is how you use it. The best smartphone…
…is the phone you use in smart ways.
PS: I’ve written down instructions on some of the changes I’ve made to my phone to be more productive here.
