A shopper uses her smartphone at the Pembroke Pines, Fla., Best Buy.
My wife and I got new smart phones last week, proving once again the incomparable value of grandchildren.
It’s been two years since I got my first smart phone.
Amazing how much smarter they’ve gotten in that time, and how much, apparently, I haven’t.
First, the phone downloaded my 1,400 contacts, and all the information under each one, and presented it to me in clear, readable, fully searchable form. I didn’t even ask it to, and I still don’t know how it knew to do it. Ditto for my calendar and to-do list.
Getting my contacts onto my old phone two years ago was nightmarish three-day process that involved searching obscure sites on the internet, translating the contact list into some language I’d never heard of, and a few hundred other steps I can’t remember, thankfully.
And once the contacts were on the old phone, I could only search for the name in the heading, not all the information under each name.
My new phone also popped up with all the photos from my old phone, without my asking, and displayed them on a big, bright screen that looked twice as good.
But over the last week, as I attempted to modify how the phone alerts me to personal versus business email, and email versus text messages, how to move and remove icons on the screen, and how to do a dozen other tasks for which the phone is smarter than I am, a familiar pattern emerged.
First, I try to do it myself, starting with the on-screen menus themselves, then looking for tips online, and even resorting to the entirely useless paper instruction manual.
And then I hand the phone to a grandson, tell him the problem, and watch as his fingers fly over the phone's menus and keyboard so fast I cannot keep up, or possibly duplicate what he did.
And, a few seconds to a minute or so later, he hands the phone back to me, fixed just the way I want it.
So how do you digitally challenged people without grandchildren outsmart your phones?
