You may recall for my birthday present to myself earlier in April, we ported over our land line phone to a new smart phone. I absolutely love my smart phone and learn lots of new things to do with it all the time. Maybe I'll share some of my favorite apps too sometime. Anyway, I probably won't love the bill that comes along next month so I'm trying to justify the expense. There are a lot of ways to use this thing to make you feel like you're getting your moneys worth, so I thought I'd share a few with you.
- Ditch the phone on the desk - GONE! The landline phone is now obsolete and ready to be boxed up in its original box from fifteen years ago, and sold at our next garage sale (which will probably be in October thanks to a neighborhood garage sale nark). And the caller id box is gone too, and all the wires under the desk and trailing along the walls.
- Ditch the watch – I have worn a watch all my life until I got a smart phone. Being the prompt, timely person that I am – I like to ALWAYS know what time it is. Now, I don't need to wear my watch anymore since my smart phone knows the time. Although, I still don't always carry my phone with me and I go thorough withdrawals about not knowing the time when I'm biking, motorcycling, walking around Busch Gardens (they don't have clocks there either and we've dubbed BG a no phone zone), or when I'm at lunch at work reading. But I do look at my wrist where my watch used to be a little less often.
- Check for the cheapest gas price – there are plenty of FREE apps out there in the Market (https://market.android.com/) to help map out the cheapest gas station. Although we don't really use that much gas on our motorcycles, and none on my bike – we do occasionally drive to the grocery store when we're getting a heavy load (like this week with a bunch of free Powerade and Honest Tea). Anyway, these apps might save you a few pennies.
- Garage Sale shopping resale prices – again I don't go to garage sales, but I might so I can monitor who is having them too often and turn them into the city for a code violation (just kidding!!). Anyway, when you're garage sale shopping you can just look up on the Internet on your phone, the item you're perusing and see what the going price is on Ebay. You might find some treasure for $0.25 and be able to sell it for $50 on Ebay. It's also a great way to check prices of items any time you are shopping to determine if you're getting the best price.
- Ditch the Ipod – Even though I love my Ipod Shuffle and Nano, they are annoying that I have to upload my own music at home from my computer. I just reloaded my biking ipod after listening to the same set of 400 songs for about four months – much too long! Anyway, with the smart phone I can just play my music that I've purchased through Amazon.com MP3 Cloud Player and they store in my "cloud". Yes that's cloud computing at its finest. Music that is stored out in web space that I can access from any of my sources – laptops, smart phone, desktop computer.
- Ditch the point and shoot camera – The quality of the photo and video on these new smart phones is amazingly great! It doesn't replace the Nikon DSLR camera, but for those casual events or activities when you don't want to lug around a HUGE camera, the smart phone works just fine.
- Ditch that old calculator on your desk – the calculator on the smart phone is handy and shows you the result in big numbers, and you always have it with you. So now I've cleared away the clock, the calculator, and the landline phone off my desk at home - its big and bare!
- Mobile coupons – many merchants (Target is one) now have apps where you can just show the cashier your phone coupon and they scan it for a discount.
- Ditch the book – a free app Overdrive Media is an ebook reader, compatible with Hillsborough County Libraries where you can check out free new ebooks for seven days, and read them on your smart phone.
So now I hope you feel smarter using your smart phone, instead of wasting your time checking email, the weather, the sports, playing games or texting. None of those activities save you any money or make you smarter.
