The Joplin Globe, Joplin, MO

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February 3, 2012

Joe Hadsall: Cheapskate pwned by inner geek

By Joe Hadsall Globe Features Editor

JOPLIN, Mo. — My geekitude is constantly at war with another major part of my personality: The cheapskate.

As much as I love gadgets and tech, I can’t bring myself to spend major money on them until after a couple of years. That lets the price go down and the first-run bugs get quashed.

I’ve resisted getting a smartphone for years now, mainly because I’m not so sold on a completely touchscreen device. The only thing that impresses me about the iPhone is the camera -- I’ve seen some amazing images taken with a Canon lens attachment, and as cool as Droids are, they are awfully big -- the Samsung Infuse, for instance, might as well be a movie screen. How’s that gonna fit in my pocket?

And there’s that whole thing about paying $25 a month for 2 gigs of data. The BlackBerry Torch, which has a touch screen and Qwerty keyboard, caught my eye and didn’t let go, however. For some reason, this thing made me think that $25 a month was a good thing.

Of course, I’m a BlackBerry guy. Even though manufacturer Research in Motion has seen better, more market-dominating days, I still love the ol’ CrackBerry. It’s the perfect mix of PDA functionality and communication that I need from such a device.

So what if there’s hundreds of thousands of apps for iPhone and Droid, but only thousands for BlackBerry? A lot of those extra apps are complete crap and have no business on anyone’s device.

But now that I’m in the smartphone world, a new layer of living has opened up to me:

~ Man, is it easy to move pictures to social networks. There’s probably nothing redeeming, socially speaking, about posting a picture of a tasty-looking meal to my Facebook page before I take my first bite. But it’s cool that I can do that, man!

~ I now understand the joy of discovering that a place offers free WiFi, and have been making restaurant choices based on that. I’m paying good money for my monthly allotment of megs, and the cheapskate in me wants to conserve as many as I can (which probably explains why I don’t post pictures of tasty-looking meals to my Facebook page very often).

~ I also now understand how social networks can drain away at my data quota. If I don’t turn off WiFi, battery life gets sucked away. But if I don’t log out from Twitter and Facebook, I use precious megs. Which means I spend way too much time logging on and off sites.

~ It is SO AWESOME to have Internet at my fingertips, wherever I see bars. Especially when I’m in San Francisco looking for bars. Or information about the Presidio. Or movie times. Or my bank account. Or if I want to announce to the world that I was spared a trip into Oakland thanks to a dangerous-yet-strategic U-turn. (Yeah, there’s a story behind that. I’ll dish one of these days.)

Right now, the geek is pwning the cheapskate. I may curse it once the first bill comes in, but right now, smartphone living is pretty cool.

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