This article is not to determine which kind of smartphone to buy but whether to bother purchasing a smartphone at all. The Catalyst for this article was when I heard a presenter of a blog for blind and visually impaired people make a comment that all people should use smartphones and that he could not understand why people wouldn’t not make use of this fantastic technology.
Before I achieved blindness I spent 30 years in I.T. and this presenter obviously does not understand the reason for the development of technology. The purpose of technology which is invading our homes and our lives is to make life easier and simpler and as a blind person this is very important. Technology has not been developed for people to impress other people with how much money they have got to spend.
Smartphones come with many functions that people never use and other functions that are available on other devices that are available about the home. You might have a smartphone with which you can watch the television or make video calls or listen to talking books etc but do you actually use these functions. When I was using a smartphone as a primary device it had a function of a spirit level and the ability to tell me the time and weather in places all over the world, two of the many functions on my smartphone I never used. In my world if a function is not useful then it is useless so why should I pay a lot of money for something that only gives me useless features. I asked around numerous friends who were cited and sight impaired and in general what I saw was they only used about 30% of the features on their smartphones.
In the summer of 2020 I repurposed my smartphone and it became a mini tablet and I purchased a Blindshell Classic feature phone and use it on a regular basis and it only has one feature that I do not use and that is a torch. I will be writing more about this phone later but you can easily do a search for it using the keywords I mentioned.
You might like to now take a good look at the features you have on your smartphone and see which ones that you did not know you had and see how they can help you in your daily life and also see how many features you do not use because you found them very difficult to use because of your visual problems.
If you feel you can justify the expense of a smartphone and make use of a lot of the features available to help you live an easier life well that is great and carry on, but if like me you found that the features available on the Blindshell Classic phone that has been developed specifically for the blind and visually impaired suit all your needs take a look at that as you’re next replacement phone.
