Smart phone dumb user

I figured I must be the last senior in Canada without a smartphone. For years, I got by with a simple portable phone that you could use just to make and receive calls, and that was all I needed. My generation doesn’t live our whole life online. But then the network the phone ran on became obsolete, and the phone no longer worked. Meanwhile, the list of things you need a smartphone for keeps growing: Uber rides, emergency alerts, the contact tracing app Covid alert, self-guided walks and museum tours, curbside pickup, probably vaccine passports. So I decided to bite the bullet. I’m not averse to technology in general. I used lots of computer resources in my job, and in retirement I learned to build the Senior Toronto website using Drupal software. But I’m new to smartphone technology and, as I found out, my old knowledge doesn’t transfer over. I’m on my own with this, don’t have any handy grandson to call on. I could tell you that I’m documenting my experience for those of you who have yet to go through it, but that’s not the whole story. The fact is, I’m spitting mad, and I need to vent.

I did my homework, decided on a certified refurbished version of an iPhone that came out a few years ago and still gets good reviews. I’m staying out of stores because of the pandemic, so I checked out the prices on Amazon and Best Buy. Every time I checked, the price went up. I learned that both these sites use dynamic pricing: prices keep fluctuating based on supply and demand. These companies don’t say whether they target individual users that way, jacking up the price once you show an interest in a product, but the prices kept rising steadily. So I stopped checking for a month or so, hoping they would forget about me. When I finally went back in, the prices had dropped down almost to the level I saw when I first started looking. So I jumped through the first hoop and ordered the phone.

Next, I went shopping for a bring-your-own-phone plan to cover talk, text and a bit of data. As you probably know, Canadians pay among the highest prices in the world for cellphone plans. This is because 90% of the market is controlled by only three companies: Bell, Rogers and Telus. But they don’t want us to think we’re being hosed, so they all set up three-tiered markets, offering three levels of service, under different company names, which are sometimes called flanker brands. The three tiers are Bell>Virgin>Lucky, Rogers>Fido>Chatr, and Telus>Koodo>Public. They all operate pretty much in lockstep, offering very similar packages with very similar prices at each tier. When one of them raises its prices, they all raise their prices. Anyway, out of this phony market I picked a bring-your-own-phone plan with a bit of data from Fido, and set it up with preauthorized credit card payments. As part of the setup process, Fido always runs a hard credit inquiry on you. Hard credit inquiries automatically lower your credit score, so my score, which had been excellent, immediately went down seven points. That’s to be expected. But then three days later, when they processed my first automated payment, they ran another hard credit inquiry. This time my credit score went down another nine points. I don’t know how many more times they’ll be doing this, but it’s unconscionable for Fido to be doing it more than once, and degrading their own customers’ credit scores.

The upshot is that I was already feeling a bit bruised and battered by the time the phone and SIM card got delivered. Such an innocuous-looking thing, about the size and weight of a chocolate bar. I stared down at it and had no idea how to turn it on. There wasn’t the tiniest piece of paper in the box, not even a quick-start guide. Even my new frying pan came with a few lines of instruction. The industry claims that by now most people already know how to use smartphones, and that they don’t read manuals. I scouted around on the internet and discovered a hodgepodge of articles and YouTube videos, mostly done by inarticulate computer nerds, and rarely focussing on beginners. So I made myself a list of things I had to learn: how to turn it on, how to turn it off, when to turn it off, how to charge it, when to charge it, how to put in the SIM card, how to run through the setup program, how to place a call, how to receive a call, how to text, how to connect to email, how to use the camera, how to search the internet. Now I’m in the process of reading articles and watching videos for each one of those things in turn, and then trying them out. It’s going to take weeks. It would probably go a bit more smoothly if I could just unclench my teeth.

It turns out that I wasn’t the last senior in Canada without a smartphone. An Environics poll conducted in July 2020 found that 65% of Canadians aged 65 and older own a smartphone. That leaves 35%, or about 2,400,000 seniors, who don’t have one. I guess that group is too small and too unpromising to merit marketing and support. But the writing is on the wall; pretty soon we won’t have much choice. Attention senior centres: please provide lots of patient individual help to your clients in selecting, setting up and using smartphones. If you’re a newbie on your own, it’s a nightmare.