We tried an experiment. We went out to the drugstore and bought a $40 cellphone.
The impetus for this experiment was our 97-year-old friend Ida. She said she may have to give up driving one day and switch to using one of the ride services, like Uber or Lyft. She figured she needed an Apple iPhone to call for a driver.
Uh-uh, we said. You do need a smartphone or a computer to call one of those ride services, but you don't have to spend $649 to $749 for an iPhone. To check that out, we bought a $40 smartphone at Walgreens.
It wasn't the cheapest phone; we could have bought one for $13, but Bob noticed it was a clamshell, or flip phone, and you can't load apps onto those. We could have bought a smartphone for $21.60 at Wal-Mart, but we were on deadline and didn't want to fool around.
So we got a TracFone, the Pixi Pulsar, made by Alcatel, a joint French and Chinese company. It uses the Android operating system.
There's no contract with this phone. You can buy your phone minutes, texts and Web time right there at the drugstore or order it on the phone itself. We chose the $20 plan for 90 days. You don't get much data downloading on this plan, but when you surf the Web while connected to your home or public Wi-Fi, you don't use any cellular data.
We were astonished at the quality of this phone, which is about the size of the original iPhone. We put all our favorite apps on it, including Lightning Bug, which plays nice background sounds for sleeping. The phone played ocean waves for us all night, and in the morning the battery was only a third less full than where it started. We were truly impressed by the quality and volume of the music we played from Spotify. We signed in to our Gmail account.
Then we tried summoning a Lyft driver just to be sure we could if Ida needed to. Oops. We thought we were just trying things out, but he showed up to get us in about two minutes, and we had to pay a $5 cancellation fee.
What's the downside here? Well, the phone is smaller than a regular smartphone, so the on-screen keyboard that shows up has really tiny letters that would be hard for some people to use. Joy had no trouble, and Bob could handle it too, but more slowly.
Fortunately, the phone took speech commands. Bob was amazed at that. That's also how we lost $5 to the Lyft service. "Try giving it a command to take us to an address downtown," Joy said to Bob. So he did, and the phone understood it perfectly.
So this is a keeper for us. If we go to Wal-Mart, we can buy 30 of them for the price of an iPhone. Maybe we'll give them out as Christmas presents.
Free Slideshows
The strangely-named company Ashampoo.com has a free slideshow program we like. It brought back the joy of looking at photos.
Slideshow Studio 2017 from Ashampoo.com starts by asking if you want to make a simple slideshow or a more advanced one. We chose "simple," but still got effects and music thrown in that made us feel like Ken Burns, famous maker of historical documentaries. You choose the song you want from whatever music you've stored to your computer. If you haven't stored any, just pop in a CD and follow the on-screen prompts to rip music to your machine.
This worked great. Our only warning is to avoid large folders of photos. Bob wondered why Joy was in the office for hours. She was transfixed by the slideshow creation process. She thought she'd turn to stone waiting for a photo to load after she clicked the add-photo button, but she couldn't stop. The solution was to reorganize her folders, limiting each to a dozen or so photos. Otherwise, the program attempts to load hundreds each time you want to add one.
When ready, click "produce" to create slides from cellphone quality on up to the highest resolution -- ultra-high definition, or 4K. Even after production, you can edit it, if you notice heads cut off or sideways photos.
By the way: Ashampoo.com got its name after a reviewer said their cleanup utility cleaned his Windows computer "like a shampoo."
App Happy
We've written about Shazam twice before, but it's been a while. So when a reader recently said it was his favorite app for bringing in music, we thought, "Why not bring it in again for those who were taking a brief nap when we did it before?"
Shazam is a free app for Android phones, iPhones, iPads or tablets, and it can identify music and play it for you -- it can even identify live television.. Tap the Shazam button to let it listen. In our test, it knew in seconds it was listening to Minuetto by Luigi Boccherini. (This was the prominent piece in the movie The Lady Killers.) It remembers your selections, and you can play them again.
Shazam was also the secret word that turned an ordinary boy into comic book super-hero Captain Marvel. (This was one of Bob's favorites, but no matter how earnestly he said the magic word, nothing happened.)
Internuts
• "Stephen King's Top 20 Rules for Writers." Search on that phrase to get tips from an author who's sold 350 million copies of his books.
• "62 of the World's Most Beautiful Libraries." Search on that phrase to see pictures of beautiful libraries around the world. Trinity College library in Dublin is awesome.
Bob and Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at bobschwa@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.
SundayMonday Business on 09/12/2016