Smartphones are no longer a useless luxury
Published on:
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Modified on:
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Students without smartphones are disadvantaged in today’s
technological society. The more often a student can check their inbox,
social media and other online necessities, the better off they are in
landing an internship or job. Students without such devices are sadly
the water buffalos with the bad legs.
A smartphone is not a pittance of course, but with Nokia’s $100 Lumia 900, average Joes can get into the game. Previous to the Lumia 900, the market contained $50-$100 piece-of-crap plastic knockoffs that break on use, $500 Android phones for watching videos and $600 iPhones for wasting time on games and apps.
There is a downside to the frugal nature of the $100 smartphone, the specs. The Lumia 900 uses a basic processor, has mediocre memory of 16 gigs and doesn’t have thousands of (ambiguously useless) apps. It runs Windows Phone 7 which is as simple as an OS can get, although the Lumia 900 is the best of the worst in this respect. And on the bright side, critics say the battery life is good.
Lumia’s multitasking is about as satisfactory as and iPhone or Android, which is to say: Very bad. If you want to open a program, prepare to sit behind a Java powered virtual machine that will clunk and crawl it’s way to progress. The Lumia 900 also is void of removable storage — no slots for flash drives or micro SD cards. Those would have come in handy, especially for students.
This can be a blessing as well though because checking email and keeping up with contacts doesn’t require all the bells and whistles of a child’s plaything. Students with money (or students with parents with money) will be happy with an overpriced fancy looking iPhone. They will no doubt use it to send enraged avians flying, doodle anything and maybe at the end of the day they’ll use it to check on resumes and job offers.
As long as the average student can stomach the two-year agreement with AT&T, the Lumia 900 is the relatively frugal way to stay up-to-date in the rat race.
A smartphone is not a pittance of course, but with Nokia’s $100 Lumia 900, average Joes can get into the game. Previous to the Lumia 900, the market contained $50-$100 piece-of-crap plastic knockoffs that break on use, $500 Android phones for watching videos and $600 iPhones for wasting time on games and apps.
There is a downside to the frugal nature of the $100 smartphone, the specs. The Lumia 900 uses a basic processor, has mediocre memory of 16 gigs and doesn’t have thousands of (ambiguously useless) apps. It runs Windows Phone 7 which is as simple as an OS can get, although the Lumia 900 is the best of the worst in this respect. And on the bright side, critics say the battery life is good.
Lumia’s multitasking is about as satisfactory as and iPhone or Android, which is to say: Very bad. If you want to open a program, prepare to sit behind a Java powered virtual machine that will clunk and crawl it’s way to progress. The Lumia 900 also is void of removable storage — no slots for flash drives or micro SD cards. Those would have come in handy, especially for students.
This can be a blessing as well though because checking email and keeping up with contacts doesn’t require all the bells and whistles of a child’s plaything. Students with money (or students with parents with money) will be happy with an overpriced fancy looking iPhone. They will no doubt use it to send enraged avians flying, doodle anything and maybe at the end of the day they’ll use it to check on resumes and job offers.
As long as the average student can stomach the two-year agreement with AT&T, the Lumia 900 is the relatively frugal way to stay up-to-date in the rat race.
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