Life without a smartphone

If you're following me on Twitter, you'll already know that my beautiful brand new BlackBerry Q10 conked out last weekend after trying to install a software update and has been sent off to be repaired. As a result, T-Mobile have given me an awful loan phone until I get my BlackBerry back. This could take up to 3 weeks. It's the most basic phone I've ever had, and literally just facilitates calls and texts. No camera, no internet, and the smallest screen I've ever seen.

The loan phone has one positive... I only have to charge it every 4 days whereas I had to charge my BlackBerry every night. This is most definitely the only positive, and is probably only saving me about 20p off my electric bill.

I'd seriously forgotten what it was like to live without a smartphone, so I'm missing my BlackBerry a lot and can't wait to get it back. I am aware that this post is very #firstworldproblems, but I'm sure most of you would feel the same if you found yourselves without a smartphone for a few weeks. Please correct me if I'm wrong!


Here are the ten things I miss most about my BlackBerry:

1. I can't just Google something whenever I feel like it. For someone who Googles everything under the sun (and I do mean EVERYTHING), this is sheer torture.

2. I can't take photographs of random views, food, shopping and so on. I love taking photographs and have made an extra special effort to take lots of photos this year so I'm really missing my phone camera, especially as the BlackBerry Q10 camera is of a very high quality.

3. I can't tweet when I'm out and about. I keep thinking of things I want to tweet, then remembering that I can't until I get home and go on my laptop. By the time I get to my laptop, I've forgotten what I wanted to tweet in the first place. As an avid tweeter who also likes to twitpic frequently, this is very difficult!

4. On a similar note, I can't check my personal emails until I get home and go on my laptop. On my BlackBerry, they'd be delivered straight to my phone like text messages. This usually means I have about 40 emails waiting for me by the time I get home and sometimes miss important messages.

5. I can't promote my blog as much as usual as I haven't got constant access to the internet or to Twitter, my main promotional tool. My blog views are suffering as a result!

6. This stupid basic phone doesn't automatically put apostrophes in for me, and it takes ages to put them in manually. For a grammar geek, this is no fun as I can't bear to leave them out! It also doesn't capitalise 'I' automatically. So irritating.

7. This basic phone arranges my text messages into 'inbox' and 'outbox', rather than displaying the text messages as conversations. So if someone sends me three questions in a text message, I can't just keep scrolling up to check what they were while I reply. How did I ever cope with this before?!

8. I have to use the standard ringtones that came with the phone... there aren't many of these and they're all rubbish and annoying. I miss having McFly as my ringtone! The same applies to the alarm tone... I can no longer wake up to Hakuna Matata.

9. I never go on my laptop over the weekend as I'm always out and about, so this means I'm left without internet access for an entire weekend. How am I supposed to catch up on anything? And no Twitter for a whole weekend? Seriously? The internet is like my oxygen...!

10. I miss my Twinkle countdown app. Now I have to manually count how many days are left until I go on holiday...


I can think of many more reasons why I miss my Blackberry and why this basic phone is so awful, but I think I should probably stop now before I bore you. Has anyone else been separated from their smartphone lately? Did you miss these ten things too? Share your pain!