Could you live without a smartphone?

There is a small but finite chance that the guy is a Fred alias Mike, recent posts and posting locations have made me wonder.

It's just a feeling, I don't have any real proof.

I agree with Mystica, it seems petty to disagree with a post like her's and I somehow don't see members resident in the Philippines browsing this forum while out and about and replying on their phones a high percentage of the time.

No need to leave Mystica, last time was a bit of a misunderstanding, you are very welcome here.

Got my new phone, it's very nice but I would not say the camera lived up to the Hasselblad brand name but it's not bad.

Tons of RAM and a huge 256GB of storage, doesn't really feel any faster than the old one as I think phones reached the limits of observable performance several years ago unles you are a gamer you probably won't notice any improvement with a new phone, XE loads just as fast on both of them and is one of my oft most used apps.

Got a nice Spigen case for it right away.

OnePlus, Chinese company they were renowned for down to earth quality phones that were not full of bloated software however they have merged with OPPO and the software is not quite as clean as it once was Oxygen OS was/is better than OPPO's Colour OS but they merged some aspects into Oxygen OS.

I would say that it feels just like a small refresh of my OnePlus 7 Pro that I have had for over three years now.

OnePlus 10 Pro 5G | OnePlus United Kingdom

Meant to add battery life is very good on these phones.

This is my old one with my Philippine SIM in it.


And my new one with an O2 SIM about 2 days battery.

I've had my Philippine number for years Jim, I switch to roaming every time I leave.

Under this proposed new law my kids will end up losing their numbers as well as me losing mine, I have about 1000 peso on that number, I'll need to use that all up at Christmas.

This is further autoritarian repression of the population, yeah it means criminals cant get burner phones but it also means whistle-blowers can't get information out in the public interest.

So now with so many services like banking requiring two factor authentication they are going to cut citizens off from the services they need, technically I should have been able to use Grab and Pay Maya (now Maya) but it proved impossible to register, I used Grab in the past and I did manage to use it but only through loading cash at a 7/11 you can't even pay a bill remotely with a foreign bank card these days, just great such a forward looking caring government removing simple liberties from their people and the foreign friends of their country.

Have you noticed, how everything has become harder to do this last 7 or so years, how hard it is for citizens to even get a passport appointment, my kids probably don't have enough id to retain their phone numbers if this passes, it was hard enough getting them bank accounts earlier this year, that took 4 separate visits to the bank to provide enough documentary proof to open an account for them.

Starting to think I don't want to move there.

Oh and I meant to add SMART have had my name and details attached to my phone number ever since I got it as I managed the account online, and I still use their Gigalife app.

Which is why laws like this are repressive, they never achieve the declared goal but the supposed goal is never the real goal, this law just makes it easier to track the citizenry, it will repress journalists and further reduce the ability to hear dissenting voices, this is a tool of authoritarian regime.

Even here you can still be pretty much anonymous, you can buy a SIM card for cash in a store and you can load it from a number on a voucher that you purchase with cash. The phone is still physcially trackable you can't stop that and there are a million other ways you could leak your own identity through it like carrying it at the same time as a registered phone that is on contract, the network can very easily see two radio id's moving about from cell to cell at exactly the same time.

Smart already know who I am in the Philippines, they know where I live because of how much time the phone spends in the same cell, they know where I shop where I go out to, but now they need my passport too, on record.