Time for a Change

Cooling on the Fire Phone

Last night I was one click away from ending my eight-month dalliance with the Amazon Fire Phone. I went to bed without clicking and had nightmares.

In one, uniformed men were going through lockers, stealing people's stuff, including mine. In the dream, I yelled "Hey!" loud enough, or close enough to speech, to wake myself up. In another dream, I was taken into custody in a prisoner of war camp where physical abuse was likely, and it wasn't clear how long I would be imprisoned. I woke up appreciating the courage of John McCain. 

I'm not saying these were iPhone nightmares, but they did perhaps suggest a deeper turmoil than the one I thought had launched this serial tech odyssey on Wattpad. It has been known for decades that the car we drive says a lot about our personality and self-image. Perhaps the choice of a phone carries similar weight these days. Instead of Chevy versus Ford, it's "Are you Android or Apple?" I have a contrarian friend in Maine who bought a Windows Phone, and he loves it, partly because it sets him apart. It's also a perfectly good phone, he says. I know exactly one other person in my offline world who has a Fire Phone. We are both Amazon Fan Boys in good standing; we own the Fire phone as a badge of honor, no matter how few Amazon sold. 

I left South by Southwest this week leaning toward sticking with Fire well into the summer. My Pebble encounter left me eager to see how the Pebble Time and Steel will work. But in yesterday's winding down day back here in Denver, a cool-down took place. Apps did it, or the lack of them on the Fire. That's always been an issue, but until yesterday I've been willing to put up with the inconvenience and irritation.

For example, Darlene and I track our spending and savings with an app from our bank. It works fine on her iPhone 5s but not on the Fire. That means she can record quilting expenditures and stay on track with our savings budget, while my tech spending tends to careen out of control. I can enter spending on the iPad mini, but I often don't have it handy when I make a tech purchase. The Fire's Starbucks app that I found at 1Market Mobile borked again yesterday, sending me a message that "Starbucks has stopped" as I walked to Writers Square for a flat white. By quitting and reinstalling the app as I approached the door, I managed to get it running just in time for the barrista to scan my Fire for the purchase.

Meerkat was the final straw.

That's the app that dazzled South By, the drink word at the five-day party. As my Austin friend Bryan Person pointed out, Meerkat quickly became a verb, meaning roughly "to livestream without friction, with a single tap." The app, released the week before SXSW started, works only on iOS, but an Android version will be out soon. I installed it on my iPad mini, easily launching a livestream of the view out our window, showing traffic from our high-rise perch in downtown Denver. It was slightly more thrilling than watching butter melt, and four people watched briefly. Checking out the available Meerkat streams, I found an cute one of a couple on their drive home in Mexico City. I left a "safe trip" Meerkat message that the wife saw and relayed to her husband, who was driving. When they saw that I was following, they switched from Spanish to English.

Last night Darlene and I had supper in Denver's LoDo district with an old friend from Casper, Wyoming, and his wife. Larry works in IT at a huge bank. On the walk to McCormick's he told me the bank is switching all its mobile devices to Apple from Blackberry, because Apple has the best security. It's certainly better than the wild west Android environment from a cautious bank's point of view, he said. As I make my way through Marc Goodman's excellent Future Crimes, in which Goodman, a high-level security expert, details the exponential growth in cyber crimes, I am more inclined to take cyber safety seriously. I also remember when corporate IT departments smirked when someone like me asked to use a Mac for our work. Now not so much, apparently. Apple's iPhone is probably the better choice for security, compared with the Android-based Fire Phone.

As I considered making the switch last night, I came up with one small reason to wait. I will be taking video at the wedding of my niece in two weeks, and I wasn't sure I would be able to find a way to attach the big boy iPhone 6 Plus to my tripod in Cambridge. I've used my Fire Phone with the tripod, and it works great with an attachment. At Amazon.com, I found a cellphone tripod adapter specifically designed for phones the size of the 6 Plus. It costs $6.95 with free two-day shipping via Prime. I knew if I clicked through to purchase it, there would be no turning back. 

Instead, I put the tripod adapter on my Amazon wish list and went to bed.