phones

Just a bog standard, cheap pay as you go phone for me. I probably top it up about twice a year and that's plenty.

It seems I'm not very good at text 'ettiquette' either. When I receive a text message, I only send a reply if I think one is necessary. Apparently, this is not acceptable behaviour, as the sender is left in a state of agonized uncertainty, not knowing whether or not I have received said message.
I don't seem to get many text messages these days.

One thing I do find it useful for is setting reminders to go off at exactly the time I need to remember do something important. Given my appalling memory, that comes in very useful.

 

Forgot to say, I also use mine as my sat nav - through the car's bluetooth connection so it's nice and loud. Also for playing music, either through the headphones or again through the car's bluetooth.

 

I find the GPS function on smartphones extremely useful, not only as a satnav (although I tend to use an 8" tablet for longer, planned journeys - much easier to view that in a holder on the windscreen) but to quickly use Google to locate the nearest supermarket, chemist, etc. and get guided there. I also use the My Tracks app to record walks, bike rides and dog walks

 

I find smartphones are useful for that too. If your car doesn't have a built in satnav system, they're exactly that. Much better than an AA roadmap too.
My old nokia had speed camera alerts, speed limit warnings, everything you'd need for driving along the A5.

 

Smartphones can be used to save money. Shopitize and CheckoutSmart apps offer all sorts of freebies and money off products. Putting an O2 sim in your phone, installing their Priority app enables you to regularly just show the code on your phone to get stuff for nothing, or get discounts in stores (and you don't need to keep that free/99p sim in your phone after installation!). I reckon we each get around £250's worth of freebies and money off our shopping every year. There are other cashback sites, but the above three are exclusively for smartphones.

Often you make on offers of free products, this week Shopitize had £1 off New Covent Garden Soups that are £1 each in Morrisons, so we used £1 off vouchers to get it for nothing then got a further £1 cashback. They offer freebies like that virtually every week. We had free chocolate from Budgens using O2 Priority codes, free (after CheckoutSmart cashback) Allisons bread from Iceland. Sometimes items are on more than one cashback site so you can claim twice, a couple of weeks ago there was £1.50 cashback on cat food that was 'Try me free' so that also made a profit (and donations to Cat Protection). Each getting paid £4 to eat Birds Eye pasta that was free with vouchers from Tesco ATMs was a good one.

Today we'll each be getting these freebies worth £5.24 from Tesco which will help get our spend up to £20 to use a money off voucher, get carrier bag/Clubcard/Fuelsave points. We also try and get our freebies as part of a 'Price Promise' shop to get extra money off our next shop.




And that's another use of smartphones - screenshots. Also find video conferencing useful.

P.S. When you've got an O2 sim in your phone download their wifi app to get free access to all their wifi hotspots.

 

Not even milk? Been getting 25p off every 4 pints for ages, 89p at Asda -25p = 64p for 4 pts. Got free bottles of cider, sparkling water, £10 bottles of perfume from The Fragrance Shop just before Xmas which were handy as presents (that's when it's worth having multiple O2 sims/accounts and each visiting several shops, swopping the sims around), etc., money off at Currys/PC world, their discounts are rather mean at the moment but there was £10 off £100, £20 off £200, etc. a while ago.

Freebies are useful to get free car parking at some town centre supermarkets where there's a minimum spend, that's another saving, they also mean you can get a free newspaper from Waitrose, which is even more useful if it has a money off voucher, or freeplants from Homebase voucher in it. If the stuff is totally useless to us it can be donated to food banks or as tombola prizes. Free Galaxy ice creams for us from Budgens this week.

 

Making internet phone calls where there's no phone reception but there's wifi or mobile broadband access.

 

We try and do better than simply avoiding pay car parks, parking somewhere free, looking for discarded counterfoils at the supermarkets pay car parks, 'buying' some freebies, claiming the £1 or £1.50 back at the checkout and making a profit on it.

 

I have a Samsung S4 . In a production meeting today at the office , bloomin' thing suddenly started barking like an excited puppy ! Apparently the Puppy Birthday game I had downloaded for Evie had decided its puppy's birthday , and announced it to the production management team. These smart phones are far too smart