I arrived back in Portsmouth on Saturday night after a two-week break with the family in the Charente region of France. For the entire two weeks, I was offline, and I struggle to remember such an extended period when I wasn't in some way connected to the Internet in the last decade.
Partly this was a conscious decision to focus on things in the real (rather than virtual) realm, partly it's because I'm too tight to pay the exorbitant rates that the mobile operators seem to think appropriate for roaming data. What did I learn?
Well, the main thing was that battery life on modern smart phones is dramatically improved if you just use them as a phone. Turn off data, and therefore a who stack of services, and you can remember the days when a phone would go for days without it needing to be charged up.
Other than that, well, I didn't miss it. And not having the nagging devices bleeping me for new email/tweets/facebook updates and so on was quite easy to drop (although a toddler and a six-month-old gave me a new dimension of ADHD than my normal mobile-induced state).
But now it's back to reality. Or whatever this mobile device-enabled world is…
mmitII 