14 DAY TRIAL // Went fishing this weekend with a bunch of old friends that I hardly get to see anymore these days. Wouldn’t miss it for the world, so I was really excited.
The instant I receive the news that we’re going into the wild I start packing. In 20 minutes flat, I put together a backpack containing everything I need for our admittedly short, two-day excursion. Everything but my phone’s charger. I realize this halfway there. In other words, too late to do anything about it. I'm the only iPhone user of the four, and the only one with mobile Internet access.
Nothing to worry about, right?
Arriving at our destination – a murky but inviting river near Bucharest going by the name of Arges – we rush to unpack and get to business. “First one to make a catch treats the rest to a beer!” We like to be competitive but still get something out of losing. We’re fun like that.
So we sprawl out the tools, lay the tent, get everything in order and start angling for dinner. When we’re not catching – especially yours truly, who picked out the worst possible spot to claim victory – we’re taking pictures with our phones. I know there's no Lightning cable in sight, but I'm confident that with the right settings I'll be able to preserve enough battery life to last me until I get back home. “I'll tell everyone at home that I'm fine and keep it mostly on AirPlane mode.”
When you leave the city, everything’s awesome and worth taking pictures of. Like the morning dew on a spider’s web, the sun setting over the rapidly flowing Arges river, or one of our group members arriving victoriously from the baron field behind us clutching a massive tree log for fire wood. Good times!
The evening comes and we thank Arges river for sparing a few dozen fish, divided (not so evenly) among the four of us. The photography continues through the night. The camp fire dims slowly but surely. We run out of wood and it’s getting chilly. Not to mention late. We take our spots in the tent. I still have a 30% charge. I call my girlfriend to let her know we're turning in and keep telling myself “don’t forget to turn on Airplane mode when you're done.”
Surprisingly, I actually remember to enable Airplane mode before occupying my rightful place in the massive tent we brought. As the trio next to me starts the snoring symphony – no iPhone no worries, right? – I slide the phone in my pocket and so it becomes a quartet.
Waking up to panic
The next day, I wake up, have some coffee, and start checking the rods to see if I've caught anything. Not surprisingly, all I've caught is debris from the riverbed. I start to untangle them.
A few minutes into the ordeal, I’m thinking “Better call my gal, tell her the wolves decided to spare our lives last night.” There are no wolves around Bucharest, of course. I reach for my iPhone.
Lo and behold, the thing is dead. Panic ensues, and I start tracing back my steps to the tent trying to recall what went wrong. I instantly remember I had accidentally enabled the camera app two times that day as I slid the phone into my pocket. I do this quite often, because of the camera shortcut on the lock screen. The phone gets hellishly hot after 5 to 10 minutes and so I’m usually made aware of the problem quickly. Apparently, this time I was so tired that I didn't feel a thing.
I've learned from similar mistakes in the past that this drains the phone’s battery really fast, and the phone doesn’t go to sleep if you keep moving. The thin cloth that makes up a pocket isn't enough to prevent it from recording touches from my thigh. For all I know, I turned on the camera not with my hand, but with the upper part of my leg.
I know my better half will start to worry if she doesn’t hear from me soon. Another problem is getting home. From the point of entering the city, she’s supposed to pick me up. I don’t know her number by heart (neither does she know mine, so we’re even) and none of my friends have it either. The car that took us here is not mine and the deal is to split up when we get back to civilization. For various reasons not worth mentioning here, there’s no way for that ride to make it all the way to my home. More panic ensues.
“Hand of God”
Miraculously, after trying to power on the phone a second time, I get it to work for a brief minute. Long enough to quickly dictate the number to one of my friends. He saves it to his own phone and everything goes back to normal. It feels like God came down from the heavens and gave the thing a nudge. The phone is warm again, too. “Oh, I left it in the sun.”
Things turned out well eventually, but imagine this happening when you’re alone. You tweak every setting carefully so the phone drains as little power as possible, shut down its radios completely, and when you finally put it away you accidentally swipe upwards on the lock-screen and the camera app launches. How stupid is that?
There are various scenarios where this type of thing can end up endangering your life, simply because we unanimously decided that taking two seconds to launch the iPhone’s camera was too long, while Apple ceded to our demands and put a shortcut on the lock screen. It’s hardly worth sacrificing your ties to the world.
So remember to always make sure the phone is fully asleep when you put it back in your pocket. A more drastic measure is to disable the camera app from Restrictions. However, it would be great to be able to remove the shortcut without disabling the phone’s camera altogether. If you work at Apple, please relay this to Craig Federighi’s engineering team.
