Oooooh, a new iPhone 4S…

I was planning on writing an entry about yesterday’s goings-on, but I got distracted. And by distracted, I mean “I spent hours playing with my new smartphone.” And by playing with, I mean “installed lots of worthless apps that I’ll probably never use.” (Now that I think about it, maybe I shouldn’t have deleted the cookbook…)

The whole process started two weeks ago on “Shop Local Saturday”. I remember that because we went to a small Sprint store in a nearby strip mall as opposed to a larger Sprint store that has a bigger selection of phones. We ended up having an extended discussion about purchasing options with the person working there that day (things were going to be sticky, given that I wasn’t due for a phone upgrade until September 2012 and I was piggy-backing off my parents’ cell phone plan) and I finally told her to put my name on the list. It’s a lot like the Nintendo Wii when it first hit the shelves: the company could have filled the stores to capacity with no problem, but they want to maintain a high demand, so Apple limits the supply.

Fast forward to today: it’s two weeks later and I still haven’t heard anything from the store. After such a long time, I’m wondering just how long the list is, so I corralled Mom and we went in. I told her the visit might take less than five minutes—they could have said “Your phone will be here on Thursday of next week” or maybe stopping by would bump my name up higher on the list and I could get the phone faster. As it turned out, yes, I got it faster.

They had some iPhones in stock and never called. Whether that’s because my name didn’t actually get on the list or the list is imaginary or they simply don’t bother calling, I dunno. Whatever the reason was, Mom and I ended up spending a much larger amount of time than five minutes at the store and I walked out the door with a brand new iPhone 4S. Yay for me!

We got home sometime after 2:00—I don’t remember exactly when—and that’s when I started exploring. I learned all sorts of nifty things, one of which is how to transfer mp3 files from my laptop onto my phone. That took a while. That was the biggest reason I wanted to get a phone with 16GB of storage instead of just 8GB. I was somewhat selective on my choices of which bands/artists, which albums, etc., so I ended up transferring only 7.53GB of music. 4.7 days worth of tunes. Lotsa music.

And so that’s been the largest chunk of the day. Incidentally, I sent out my first text message ever with my new phone to someone whose cell phone had died. I started the message with “I know you won’t get this for a few days, but…” About five minutes later, the recipient called me from her house phone. She had no idea I wrote. We’d been playing telephone tag for the last few days and she gave me a call just a few minutes after I sent her a text message she couldn’t read. I thought it was pretty interesting timing, too.

Up to this point, I’ve been searching for free apps. I may pay for some eventually, but at this point, I can handle seeing little ads at the top of the screen when I’m using it as a flashlight or scanning bar codes. I may reach a point where $0.99 will keep me from going completely bonkers because an ad is so annoying, but given the cost of the phone, the calling plan, etc., I’ll keep all the pennies I can. Now that I think about it, if I’d kept the cookbook on here, I might have been inspired to go grocery shopping… shopping costs lots of pennies… removing that free app saved me lots of money. Not so worthless after all.