Within Your Walls

I have seen a few descriptions of this word, but none of them fit what I’m talking about.  My question to every gadget guru out there is this, Does Technology save us time and clutter?  I apologize off the bat if this seems like a slam to all gadget junkies out there, and you know who you are.  But, I just want the technology and gadgets that we own to help us and not create more “stuff” in our homes or clutter in our lives.

With that said, here are a list of gadgets that most people, including my family own.

-GPS, Global Positioning System, (3 in fact, one for each car, and a handheld for Geo-Caching)

-Smart Phones, (2 iphone’s, and my husband has a Motorola Android for work, not to mention the countless old phones we also own)

-Mp3 Players, (1-ipod nano, and 1 shuffle)

-Laptops, last time I counted 3, no maybe 4.  Anyhow, too many

-Desktops, well this goes along with the last entry

-Tablet PC’s, thankfully NONE

-Digital Cameras, 2, one we use and 1, well lets just say the dog chewed it and we will leave it at that.

-Digital Photo Frames, surprisingly we don’t have any.  However I think this is partially my fault, I guess you could put it like that.

-PDA or Palm Planners, well this is a personal pet peeve of mine, but I’m sure if I said yes to my husband I would probably own one.

-Kindle or E-Reader, YES!  My favorite gadget, I could write a whole post on just this, but I’ll save it for later.

Now, this is just a small list of the items people may own in their homes, but do these gadgets help us or do they create clutter in our lives?

Many of these gadgets replace items we already own, so what did you do with the item it replaced?  For instance, you bought a GPS for your car.  Did you get rid of all your maps?  Smart phones, how about your planners, or your old phones?  Did you throw those out?  Mp3 players, do you still buy CD’s and what about the ones you already own?  Here are few big ones, Digital camera and Digital photos frames, and E-Readers.  Your old film camera, you are keeping it because the digital one may break one day or what if you can’t figure out how to use your digital camera.  This is a great reason, however did you think about where to get film anymore, or even processing.  These costs have soared due to lack of demand, and the truth is you wont use it again.  Physical Photos pose another question, do you convert all of them to disk and get rid of the actual photos?  Lastly, E-readers, and I can relate to this, now that you have a Kindle do you stop buying paperbacks?  The answers to these questions are open ended and ones I’m sure you have all thought about.  However the truth remains, as we convert our lives to paperless and digital how much do we trust our electronics, and are we really reducing the clutter in our lives or are we creating more.  The answer to part of this is; we trust them until they don’t work.  For example, if you use a PDA or palm planner, you will put your life on that thing until it crashes.  Once this happens, we start keeping paper back ups and therefore doubling the clutter in our lives.

This is one of the main reasons I don’t carry a PDA or even use the planning capabilities of my smart phone.  The first is because I love the feel of pen on paper and the art of handwriting. (I’m kind of old fashioned that way).  The other is I feel I waste a lot more time entering in something that takes me 5 seconds to write on a page, it clutters up my time.  So I don’t own one and I don’t use my smart phone as a planner, which I know bothers my husband, but it’s my rebellion.  And I know it’s something that isn’t useful to me.

Staying on the subject of gadgets, there is a new one on the market that has caught my eye, Apple’s new gadget the ipad. As an iphone and G5 owner, this is a waste of money and a useless piece of equipment. After looking at it on Apples website I was even more convinced that they made a grown up itouch/iphone.  The Ipad has nothing catchy about it except aesthetics; I feel if they were going to create something new they would have been a bit more innovative.  The ipad doesn’t replace or make anything easier, which is what gadget are suppose to do.  I am truly sorry I have nothing good to say about the ipad.  I just feel that apple is advertising this to current apple owners and it is just a “must have” gadget, it’s nothing productive. This almost reminds me of the Macbook Air, this is also a useless piece, with no external ports everything has to be wifi, which is not always possible.  You can’t own this item without having a desktop or another laptop, it’s simply and expensive accessory, like the ipad.

To conclude on this, each person sees the potential and user friendliness of each and every gadget differently, so before you buy your gadgets and “must haves”, look at them, do your research, and see if you are going to use them to their fullest ability. Or is it just a status symbol that’s going to clutter your live, waste your time and money, and eventually find a new home in a drawer taking up space.

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Android, Clutter, desktops, digital cameras, Digital Photo frames, Gadgets, GPS. Smart Phone, ipad, Iphone, Kindle, laptops, macbook air, Mp3, must haves, Palm, PDA, saving time, tablet pc