 Hello there, njroot22.com here with a Monday video, it's a little bit of an experiment and it's also a little bit of a tech talk helpful hint type situation. I gotta put my coat on because I'm in the garage, even though it looks like I'm on a tropical island or in a computer room or whatever the hell I'm gonna put behind me here. I'm also experimenting with this green screen and some new lighting here. I just, I like doing this so if you guys can stay with me here maybe we'll learn something together. And besides my new lights set up here and a little bit of fancy camera work, I mean people have been doing this for years. For me it's new so it's exciting and fun and that's what life is all about. But I'm gonna talk today really quickly about technology. I want to give you a little background. I was always ahead of the curve, always, I was the first one with a CD player for instance. I mean I think I had a Techniques SLP 230 or something, I don't know, I rode my bike in the rain like 10 miles when I was a teenager at night with no helmet. I went to the Paramus Park, Bergen Mall, Sam Goodie, Sam Ash, I forget, Sam Goodie was the store. I bought this CD player and I bought the floor model and I carried it home in a freaking glad bag under my arm riding a 10 speed bike in the pouring rain to bring this technology home. I mean this was in the 80s and I think I was one of the first people that had a CD player. Oh god it was so great. And throughout the years when things were sort of out of touch or people weren't in tune with technology, there was no internet, you had magazines, you had the word of mouth. Technology was fun back then, it was something really new and different and unique. These days technology is omnipresent I guess you could say, everybody has technology, everything is an app, everything is fast and dandy and I don't know. I was one of the first ones with a cell phone. I worked for Radio Shack, I had one of those big ass brick phones, they literally weighed like four pounds. I can't remember exactly, but they had this long antenna, it was like longer than the straw on my drink and it was like, it was like, it was literally like using my drink as a cell phone. Look at it, I mean it's a green straw, you're not going to be able to see it. But let's just say I was on the phone, hello. It was really that heavy. This is a 32 ounce drink, this is two pounds plus the glass. And I thought I was the coolest thing, but what was I doing on this phone? I wasn't saving people's lives, I wasn't like an emergency person that needed to be in touch with everybody at all times. I guess I talked on the phone because I had a phone that I could talk to people on when I'm in the middle of freaking nowhere and nobody gives a crap where I am. It was just interesting. I thought it was cool to get a call when no one else had a phone, to get a call somewhere, oh hello, hey, what's up man, yo. It's like that Budweiser girl, I don't know. Pointless when you think about it, in retrospect. And then I kept getting newer phones and I always had the latest, I remember I had this one cell phone when I was, I guess it was right after 9-11 in the city. In 2001, I think it was, I believe it was November 2001, I went to this place in Manhattan and I bought a cell phone I could wear around my neck. It was literally the size of a zippo lighter. Panasonic made it, it was the most ridiculous thing ever. Always, I've got, I've probably had 20 cell phones in my life and that's probably nothing compared to the people in the last 10 years. Some people upgrade their phones twice a year because they have to have the latest. And this is my whole point. For the last, I don't know, 5-10 years or so, I've been a Blackberry fan. I always liked, this is before it kind of settled into two main players, Apple and Android. And for a while, and I guess they still have a Windows phone, but that's really crap and Nokia had their own thing. I was always a Blackberry guy. I remember when they first had the Blackberry pagers. The things just worked. They always worked. And then the Blackberry phones and the keyboard, and I guess I had more friends and I had to do more things for work in terms of instant communications. But the Blackberry keyboard was always a nice thing to have. And it just seemed to work. It had some sort of intuitiveness that those i9 or whatever those things, where you could type and you had to hit the letter three times to type one letter and hit the Q three times. You know, just over the past few years, I remember trying the droid system, the Android system, and it never really worked. And it's still not up to par, I guess, with the Apple ecosystem. But I'm not an Apple fan because I hate that they have proprietary chargers, wires, and you can't put memory cards in Apple products. To me, I just think there's something really sick about them. But let me cut to the chase here. I've been a Blackberry person for a long time, and I still sort of am up until just this year. I've been a Blackberry guy on when they had this Blackberry 10 operating system and then they finally embraced the Android ecosystem. But I'll give you an example. I got this phone last year. It's a Blackberry D-Tech 50. This was $300 or $400 when it was new. I paid like 50 bucks on eBay. I got a brand new one. And it just works. But this little D-Tech 50 here, here, I have eBay on the screen here. I don't know if you could see that, probably not. But I had this phone, let me rewind here. I had a priv. This priv, it had a slide-out keyboard. And I thought that was a great thing. I never used a keyboard. I was always a keyboard fanx. I hated typing on the screen. I just didn't like typing on the screen. But when Blackberry introduced their keyboard, something about their keyboard app or whatever you want to call it, it just seems to work. And it just predicts your words. And you slide up to finish the word. And you can type pretty quickly on it. So I finally embraced the Blackberry on Android. The reason I like it is because at the root level, and this is geek talk, the root level, it's protected at the hardware level. So the Blackberry phones, when they say they're the safest phones or most well-protected phones on the market, they are. Better than, I wouldn't trust any other company if I had 100% requirement for safety. But this D-Tech 50, I love it. It's light as anything. It's thin. It's small. But the camera left a lot to be desired. And I do a lot of pictures for this blog with the camera. And something about it, it just didn't have enough memory. I kind of cheaped out on this D-Tech 50. So I said, let me get, I asked my family for a D-Tech 60 for Christmas, which I got. And that was like $200 or $300, $250. And it was like a $700 phone, new. But at the same time, I discovered an LG phone. This is what's great. I have an LG V20. Less than two years ago, this was like $800. I got it for like $70 on eBay. And this phone is great. It doesn't have the hardware protection that the Blackberry models have. But it has a couple things. And I'm using Mint Mobile, by the way. Mint Mobile, I pay $180 a year for cell service. That's $15 a month. And this works on the Mint Mobile network. But there was two things that made me finally switch out of the Blackberry system. And I'm kind of like torn about this, because this, I have to pretend this is a D-60. The D-Tech 60, sorry. The D-Tech 60 and this LG V20 are the same Snapdragon process. I forget what it is, 825 or whatever. And they're essentially the same, but the Blackberry just is faster. It's just a faster. The screen is rich. It's a really nice screen. But the reason I went with this V20 was because of this camera. The camera is, and I think a lot of models out there these days have dual cameras. But it's a wide angle camera. And I've always been a wide angle guy. In fact, I'm shooting this video on a wide angle, a Panasonic wide angle. And it's zoomed in, it's like 28 millimeters now. It goes up to 14 millimeters, which is really wide. And you can just capture more of its scene. I'm a big scene type guy, and angles. This camera is just phenomenal. I mean, if you're taking certain shots for a stylistic type photographer like myself, you like to get wide angle. I mean, it doesn't have a little fisheye effect, whereas this one does not, the camera I'm using. But then the second thing that I profoundly found useful was the fact, that's not working with the hell. Anyway, the fact that the BlackBerry phones were unable to make calls over Wi-Fi. Not every model phone does. And you only have like a few minutes of whatever, I have unlimited, but I could never use any phone where we live. We have no cell service. So having a phone where you can use your cell phone over Wi-Fi is kind of a big deal. Because if you're out and about and you need to make a lot of calls, you don't use up your data plan, I have to reboot my phone here, and that's hilarious, isn't it? It's ridiculous, this phone just kind of locked up. I mean, it's so funny that I have to, I don't want voice care. Like, this phone has been working flawlessly, it's all locked up now. I have no idea why. I didn't drop it or anything. So, I probably got hacked. Because if you hold the power button down long enough, it'll, the funny thing is, the good thing about this Black, this LG B20 is that you can open up the case, it has a nice metal back. I hate doing this. You use voice care. I don't want voice care. F'd up. See you later, battery. Reboot. Anyway, it's a really well made phone and let me get to the point here. The point of my whole situation is, never buy a new phone, get conditioning yourself to never need a new cell phone, because you pay $1,000, like the new Apple phones are $1,000, all the latest Samsung phones are like $900, and that's not including like the requirement for a two year plan and penalties if you cancel. If you want to unlock the phone, sometimes you're paying $1,200 for it. Like I said, I got this V20, which was the greatest thing ever. It was the flagship best phone in 2017. And now it's 2019 and it's $70 on eBay. I mean, it's, I think the going price is more like $150, I just scored a good deal. The guy said it was like, they rated A, B, C, D. It was in C condition. It's brand new. It doesn't have a thing wrong with it. I love it. And you can install most of the BlackBerry apps, by the way. The BlackBerry apps are good. Like they have this email called the hub where you get all your messages, text messages, social media if you want, and like 10 email addresses all in one little inbox and they're all color coded and you can tell which is which and you can sort. I'm never, ever going to buy a new piece of technology, at least cell phones, maybe a digital camera, maybe if it's groundbreaking, but when it comes to these phones, paying a thousand bucks every year, for instance, for a new phone, only to have to just go through the whole thing and load everything and copy. I mean, I can understand why some people do upgrade their phones if they get busted up. Because I see these people, I mean, most people live off their cell phones and it's just their whole life. Everything about, they order pizza, they get food delivery, they buy stocks, they look for a job, I mean, they do everything on their cell phone, they drop it constantly and I've seen people's cell phones, it looks like stained glass. I mean, there's so many cracks on it. I use my phone very little, very little, to get harassing calls from my significant other, some personal photos which we never share online and I'll take some pictures, if you look at the Philipsburg Mall post, I think it's going up tomorrow, those pictures were all taken with this new phone that I paid $70 for and it works great except for that last fiasco I had. I think that if more people started saying, I don't need this latest and greatest thing, I'm like, what psychological triggers do these companies have on you that you need to get this latest greatest thing? I know, for instance, this V20 that I have is, I like the way it works. I mean, the Wi-Fi makes cell phone coverage pretty much irrelevant, I mean, like, you know, it just, the V30, I want to give a little tech note here, V30 and above for T-Mobile and V40 and G5 and G6 have something called Band 71. It's a new cell band that I think T-Mobile spent like $8 billion to help phones get better reception in rural areas and out in Western Jersey, for instance, the cell phone coverage is much worse than on the east side of the coast near the big cities or towards Philly or what happened, but you head up into the hills of New Jersey and, you know, cell services is not always great. I mean, I guess Verizon's better and then iPhones are better, but T-Mobile launched this new Band 71 or recently launched and it, the newer models, the only reason I would ever upgrade this V20 if I don't smash it is to get a V30 and it's selling for like $250 right now. I'm not buying a phone for $250, I'll deal with it. This year this time, you know, January 2020, it might be $50 and then if this phone needs help, I will consider it if I have some extra pocket change. So that's the whole thing. If you can just condition yourself to not want or need the latest and greatest just because someone has it and they're touting how great it is and sure as some features may be better, the camera may be better, the capacity may be better, it may be faster, it can run some apps better than others. I don't know, I just don't see the true need for, I'm rubbing my hands again because they're ice pops. I was going to wear gloves. I brought gloves. They're not really warm gloves, they're just like work gloves. But I mean, I can wear these things. I think I have poison ivy and because I was, I think I was landscaping with these and I got poison ivy one year and I think it's still in there. Oh well, it's kind of a, maybe I can set a new trend of having a poison ivy in the winter. No one has poison ivy in the winter. But anyway, I think it's a healthy thing to do to wait because not only can you get the benefits of still new technology but you don't have to pay a premium for it. And the same goes for buying a new car versus a used car. I highly recommend you don't ever buy a new car unless you're a collector and you plan to not put any miles on it and you have 10 brand new cars. A pre-owned car, it makes so much more sense. 40% less a lot of times for a two-year-old car with 30,000 miles on it. I mean, sure, yeah, the new car feels is not there but I can go on and on. There's a lot of things and there's some instances where it's not worth like a washing machine or, I mean think about it, most homes people move into are used. I hope this works out. That's it for this video. Buy used, go on eBay, you can find some really good deals.