Pulling a Hackett

Remember those initial iPhone commercials (and keynote) about the iPhone being able to replace your iPod, your point and shoot, and your cellphone? By having an LTE iPad mini and iPhone 5 I feel like I’m moving in the wrong direction sometimes.

Stephen Hacket is currently (and famously) attempting to live life without an iPhone and instead carry an unactivated LTE iPad Mini and dumbphone. Hackett isn’t doing this as a page-view publicity stunt (his blog ads don’t work like that) but rather because he wants to be a good father (and good person) by not being on his phone all the damn time. I’d like to coin this “Pulling a Hackett” now that I’m tempted to try a variation of it myself.

Since getting my LTE iPad mini with grandfathered AT&T unlimited plan I haven’t left home without it. Literally. Why? It fits in two very convenient places. The first is my pants back pocket. Sure I can’t sit down, but what I can do is have my hands free as I walk from point A to B and have the mini easy to grab. It also fits in the front zipped pocket of my jacket. This is my all year except summer jacket since it’s a heavy duty but light windbreaker that serves as the outer layer over a fleece for my winter ensemble.

I don’t feel ridiculous walking and using my iPad mini. In fact, it has taken over the iPhone’s duty as podcast player during my 2 hour walks (I’m really going to miss Hypercritical). I don’t feel ridiculous using it in people’s homes either. I spent a lot of time demoing it on Thanksgiving. It’s been with me at work where I have a company issued iPad 3. Really, the only roles it doesn’t serve well are the phone exclusive roles. It doesn’t vibrate. Only half the people I text use iMessage. It’s obviously not a phone.

Unlike Hackett, I have less of an “addiction” problem. I make everyone I know play Phone Stack during meals. If you haven’t heard, that’s where everyone puts their devices in the middle of the table and if someone picks theirs up before the check comes they pay 100% instead of splitting. Since starting several months ago, no one hast lost yet. Like water on a fire Pokémon it’s super effective. I’m not nearly popular enough to be addicted to any form of social media. In fact, I’m so unpopular I have notifications turned on for Facebook. I basically do one of two things when I “waste time” on my iDevices. Read Instapaper, and add to Instapaper. I have far too much undiagnosed attention deficit disorder to ever worry about something distracting me from being creative. On the contrary, I’m often thinking too creatively to handle the task at hand, including using my iPhone – see? just now I stopped writing to make a stack of all the iPhones and iPods on my desk.

Let that be a reminder that I’m not a journalist nor aspiring writer. I write without editing, other than stupid typos, and changes of opinion get new posts.

So yeah, no, I’m not not buying the next iPhone or anything like that. I still feel weird carrying two iDevices though. At least I can justify one as my development device and one as my “real” device but that’s hard to explain without explaining provisioning profiles (which I’m not sure anyone anywhere understands, including Apple).