Wednesday, June 19, 2013

It's called bleeding edge for a reason.


My first smartphone was the Motorola Droid, and gawd was it awful. I signed the contract the weekend after it first came out, and I was so excited. I was going to have a phone, mp3 player, web browser and a way to get on facebook when I wasn't at home. The fact that it was prone to crashing, had poor battery life, plus a few design flaws, didn't stop me loving it though.

Ray Kurzweil spoke at the GF 2045 conference recently, and Ars Technica has some good quotes from him about early adoption that I found pretty interesting. When a technology first hits the market it's usually very expensive and not very practical. That good ol' Droid that introduced me to Android was a great phone for the time, but looking back it generally annoyed the crap out of me.

Since then i've learned to stay a little behind on smart phones and this is a great time for doing that. Last years smartphones are still perfectly good devices. My last phone was the sprint version of the Galaxy S 2 that I bought off of Ebay last February, and I was perfectly happy with it. Right now I'm handing that phone down to my husband and bought a used Galaxy Nexus. While these aren't the newest phones on the market they're perfectly good phones, that can be found for a reasonable price.

This all leads to the thing that I've finally learned when it comes to using the newest tech. It's called bleeding edge for a reason. I've been bloodied by trying to use tech when it's not quite fully baked yet. Don't get me wrong we need those people that can blow $700 on a phone, but I don't really want to be that guy. I would rather get the phone that's had it's software patched a few times, or the laptop design that has been revised at once. One thing is I'll save money, the other is that I'll have less to worry about.

Google director: Early adoption is for rich chumps | Ars Technica:

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