Technology

[nosrednayduj]

Last year, I had gotten my mom this Ooma phone, which is a voice over IP service, and it's pretty lame. It is bad about actually making the connection, and then once you have a connection it drops it for a minute or so periodically (it's funny, one side can hear and the other side cannot. So when it happens, usually I'm the one who can hear, I just keep talking until Clyde says "there you are"). Anyway, mom decided she wanted a smart phone, because Clyde's works so well for him.

"Money can't buy happiness, but it goes a long way." So I bought one. We've spent a lot of time this week trying to get it set up in her using it. I have not yet canceled Ooma and I have not yet emailed everybody with her new phone number. So far, she hasn't been succeeding at answering it when I call her on it so I'm not sure it's going to really work out. Although, it took me a while to get the ring tone loud enough so maybe it will be better. But, she did put in all of her contacts, copying from a piece of paper she'd had them on, and most of that work was by herself after being taught and corrected a few times. So maybe it will work out.

Comments

[apparentparadox]

Wow. Answering an incoming call is one of the easiest things to do on a smart phone. Hard to believe she can enter contacts, but not answer the phone.

[nosrednayduj]

We had some problems with loudness of the ringer; that was my fault, because I assumed that pushing me louder button on the side of the phone would make it louder, and so it was just showing me that it was all the way up. But, it was not the ringer volume, and when I found that in settings, things got better. I also found a ring tone that had more low-frequency noise and that helped also.

But, there are two ways to answer a phone. Either you're in an app, in which case it comes up with a little box at the top and you have to put the green button, or you're not running an app and then you have to slide the green button to the side that's at the bottom of the phone. So, it's not consistent from her point of view.

We also have some problem with making sure it's within her reach.

Anyway, since then she has successfully answered several calls.

[apparentparadox]

Mark's mother is pretty techno-phobic, so getting her to use the iPad, even for stuff that she wants, is pretty hard. We have to talk her through each step each time she uses it. She really doesn't generalize in a way that people used to technology does. For example, she turns her cell phone off every night. But, when Mark asked her to turn off her cell phone and turn it back on again to see if that would fix some problem she had, she said that she didn't know how to turn it off! To her, "turning it off at night" was somehow different from "turn it off during the day".