Mobile Moan: The Most Frustrating Things About Modern Phones

modern smartphone problems

Modern smartphones are all kinds of awesome. But let’s not kid ourselves. The mobile phones of the mid-2000s beat them in many ways. Let’s take a look at the major problems with the modern phone industry.

Planned Obsolescence

Phones aren’t built to last. Because they’re so ubiquitous, phone companies want you to buy the newest and hottest phones available. They want you to buy the latest model of the phone series you’ve invested in. Which is a little odd, when you think about it. After all, these things are miniature computers. The basic functions aren’t things that really need constant updating. So how do phone companies get us buying these new phones? Simple: they purposefully make them weak and susceptible to software errors. Notice how modern phones begin slowing down horrendously after a year or so of use? This is planned obsolescence in action. Read more about it at www.theguardian.com.

Cold Callers

Okay, so cold callers have always been a problem. But there’s something distinctly frustrating about cold callers in the smartphone era. It used to be that we weren’t at home when most cold callers would call us. But these days, your phone is with you everywhere! It’s unlikely that you’ll just get a couple of cold callers bothering you every month or so. Most people have to deal with several different cold callers a week. Thankfully, phone manufacturers have generally made it easier to block numbers. If you want double-check a number before blocking it, visit www.whocalledme.com.

Bad Habits

We check our phone the second we don’t have something to do. Whatever happened to simply letting your mind wander? It’s good for you, you know. It’s also turned us into data-reliant, business-heavy beings. We’re always checking our emails, as well as the latest news updates. And those news updates are rarely cheerful, are they? A lot of us also end up disrupting our sleep patterns when we use our phones into the night. Read more about mobile phones and sleep at www.huffingtonpost.com.

Privacy Problems

Companies adore user data. It helps them perfect their marketing techniques as well as their product designs. And how do they get your data? By requiring you to give them free license to it whenever you use their services. When you own a smartphone and use it to surf the Internet, you’re quietly giving several companies permission to take and use your data. Your phone will end up storing an incredibly amount of sensitive data. This becomes a pretty big problem if someone steals it or hacks it! This is why you should look into heightened security. Find out more at www.lookout.com.

Unlocking

Remember back in the day when you had to press a certain set of keys in a particular way to unlock a phone? Nowadays, all you need is to press the unlock button and give the screen a quick swipe. This often leads to phones unlocking in your pocket, especially if your pockets aren’t very thick. The supposed solution is to buy a phone case or use fingerprint unlocking. But one is a sacrifice of cash and another is a further sacrifice of privacy. Hardly fair, is it? Still, you can get some pretty cool cases at www.redbubble.com.

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