I read Mrs hrym’s report with great interest, as it is now just over 2 years since I lowered myself cautiously into the smartphone experience, and went through many of the same adventures.
I should say that I suffer from/exult in a similar degree of "crumbliness", although I start with the theoretical advantage of a degree in Mathematics. As the degree was very much of the “Here’s to Pure Mathematics, may she never be of any use to anyone” school of thought, any advantage was strictly theoretical.
I have also had the benefit of an administrative career spent largely in the company of scientists, and a personal life spent almost entirely in the company of scientists. One might suppose that this would have resulted in my being educated in the advantages to be gained from the use of computers, but the reality was rather the other way around; the self-taught administrator attempting to educate the scientists on the potential of modern equipment to streamline their work.
In July 2012, following a major communications failure on a trip to the US, resulting in some eye-watering telephone bills, I decided that the time had come to acquire a smartphone. I did some reading around the matter, and felt that my skewbald background as outlined above, plus basic familiarity with how to get the SIM cards in and out of various family mobiles, should see me through. Little did I know! I hit the vertical learning curve with a manual which bears only a casual relationship to the phone in question, online help of which I could understand virtually nothing, no children (grown-up or otherwise) who might have contributed to my education, and no-one that I knew who had ventured into these murky waters ahead of me.
I floundered around pretty ineffectively for a while, discovering that, by turning lots of things off, I could use it as a phone. I then cautiously turned things on, and gradually got the hang of various bits of Android world. I might have just about been ready in time for our next trip to the US, when disaster struck. I was familiar with the endless updates to Windows and Office, so didn’t hesitate when I received an OTA invitation to update Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich; it was only when the phone was reduced to an electronic wreck that I realised that there was no easy “rollback” to my starting point. Strangely enough, that was when my real education began. I found the G300 section of the Vodafone Forum, quickly became impatient with the unrealistic expectations of many of the posters there, but discovered the threads on which I could explain that “I know nothing”, and ask them to say it again in simple language. I pay particular tribute to Craig, a Liverpool supporter whose username now escapes me; he pointed me in the direction of Huawei’s VF-specific downgrade download, and offered to help me install it. Remote help was of course impossible, but I read the instruction sheet several times, then one afternoon I plucked up courage, set the downgrade running – and after a sickening wait a healthy phone eventually emerged from the wreckage. The rest, as they say, is history.
So take encouragement from our example. Mrs hrym from novice to enthusiast in 3 months, me from novice to Community Expert (now Community Champion) in 17 months. My thanks to my fellow-CCs, who are very helpful with their “Did you know you can....?” and the occasional “Didn’t you know....?” You don’t have to be under 20 and wear a hoodie to learn to use a smartphone. You can be more than 3 times that age, and still find it very rewarding; the learning curve levels off after a while, though the gradient remains upward. And, living on the North Sea coast, I’d be lost without my hoodie.
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, but the phone itself is OK. Ours is VF-branded and has just got the Nougat update, btw.
