I. THE OLD LEGENDS
Like many midlife working adults in large modern cities, I grew up during the advent of the internet (still remember irc, mailing lists, Netscape and Eudora?) and personal computing devices of the 1980s, I have witnessed and lived through many generations of gadgets: from the boxy metal heavy personal desktops, to the minuscule PDAs in the 90s and beyond, to the UMPCs mostly as an expensive passing fad for the niche, then to the low-cost but cheapish Netbooks since mid 2000s, and finally at this point, the golden age of the ubiquitous Smartphones.
I was once a loyal follower of PDAs. My first love was a Palm III. Then I moved on to Handspring Prism, and then a couple of Sony Clie (NR70V, NX73V), the much deprived Abacus Wrist PDA, and finally a Handera 330 (still having it today!). I did use a Pocket PC (iPAQ 2210) for several months but the PPC platform just failed to win my favor on many counts.
The year of the Millenium marked not only the would-be-but-never-was Apocalypse, but also the birth of truly converging devices. Traditional PDAs and handhelds were quickly exiled to legacies and forgotten, thanks to the emergence of Web 2.0 as a new infrastructure of daily communications, which went hand in hand strongly with the rise of iOS and Android smartphones as the ideal all-in-one mobile solutions.
A sidenote: The Nokia N900, a truly usable Linux phone (I'm looking at you, PinePhone), was my initimate companion at one point. But two years later, I just found no words to say "No!" to my mobile service provider's FREE offer. So I switched to the gift LG Optimus G (Android 4.1) and never looked back since then.
Smartphones = a dream come true!?
But it is still too early for my dream to realize. I have always been feeling a sense of uneasiness and insecurity, worrying about yielding too much privacy automatically, unwillingly, and permanently to the world wide web especially the big manupulative moneymakers (conspiracies!). Although I develop no love for social media in general and more so MMO gaming, I still find myself spending a huge chunk of time every day feeding on online content, YouTube clips, podcasts, patreon channels, news feeds ... I even manage part of my day job online using my Android phone (now LG Q6+, still Android OS 8).
So perhaps it's time to call for a moment's respite and take stock of my gadget experience.
