I’ve been carrying two phones for the last week. I’m trying Google Fi on my Nexus 6 and so I put my TMobile sim card into my old iPhone and now I’ve got two functioning phones.
I’ve never liked carrying two phones. It creates cognitive dissonance for me. I like the simplicity of having one phone that does it all for me. And that’s the way I’ve operated since getting a cell phone over twenty years ago.
However, because most of my apps are completely interoperable across iOS and Android and sync data in the cloud, it almost doesn’t matter what phone I take out of what pocket right now.
I can do gmail on my Nexus 6 and then pick up my iPhone and the reply is there. I can take photos on both devices and they are all in Dropbox syncd across both devices. Instagram Snapchat and Twitter work identically on both platforms and it doesn’t matter which device I use to access them.
The phone number on the device does matter a bit but I’ve forwarded my Google Fi number to my TMo number so I get all my calls and texts on my iPhone. Sadly the forwarding doesn’t work in reverse which means my iPhone becomes the default voice and texting device in this current setup. It would be cool if you could virtualize a number across both devices and make that irrelevant too.
What this experience has taught me is the device and OS almost don’t matter anymore. If I want a big screen to read on I pull my Nexus 6 out of my pocket. If I want small and light, I pull out my iPhone.
I might stick with this two phone approach for a while. Google Fi is not available on iOS yet and as much as I want to move to Fi from TMo, I don’t think I want to be locked into any device or OS. And the cool thing is you don’t have to be locked in anymore. The smartphone and the smartphone operating systems have become a commoditized layer of the tech stack and users are benefitting from that.
