As someone born in the early ‘90s, tech is something I pick up fairly easily. But, the same can’t be said of our parents or the older generation.
Luckily, my mum is quite tech-savvy because of her job in administration. She’s used to inputting numbers and what surprised me was her ability to use the mouse ambidextrously. Her mouse can be on her left hand and she could still be as good with it.
Too bad that tech-savviness doesn’t extend to phones.
When Samsung added the smart call feature, she was frightened at how the phone knew who was calling her, despite it being an unknown number.
But, she’s still pretty interested in what new innovations have to offer. So since I have a Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra on hand, now that we’re all under MCO (Movement Control Order), I thought to give her the phone for a spin to take some images with.
Testing Out The Camera
Since we have house pets, it’s obvious that she would start taking pictures of those first. She’d seen the zoom function advertised, and so she experimented with it a bit too.
She found the option to just tap to zoom much more reliable, compared to selecting the zoom herself. She liked how the pictures turned out, even with the Space Zoom (100x zoom) as you can somewhat see what you’re capturing.
Like most people say, a shot not taken is a shot missed. In the shots below, she tried to take the logo of the building opposite us, which can barely be seen with the naked eye.
With the 100x zoom, we can actually make out the name.
Because we live in a small apartment, the use case scenario for 100x is limited, so she stuck with the 10x and 30x zoom instead for most of the time.
Dustiness Around The House
With a better zoom camera, she now decides to zoom around places that we rarely clean and nag for me to clean it.
Luckily with the WFH (Work From Home) order, I can just tell her that I’ll clean it on the weekends instead.
However, we do live in an apartment, so cleaning rarely takes up a lot of time. Usually, two hours of consecutive cleaning can get everything done.
Speaking of apartment living, our ceiling also had some holes from leaky roof tiles. While we have reported to the management, they’ve yet to fix it as far as we know.
So my mum took some images of them as well and reported the damage to the management again.
What Can We Do Doing MCO
With the MCO, there’s not much we could actually do. My family has resorted to trying to make bread with the resources that we have, and they’ve actually been quite successful.
With most of our time spent inside, we sometimes step out to the balcony to get some fresh air.
Aside from people watching, we’ve also kept an eye out for birds. Birds are a little hard to photograph because they move quickly and you’d want to use a tripod if you want to get the right shot, as shaky hands can ruin the shot.
We first noticed the Eurasian Tree Sparrow, the type of brown bird that we see on a daily basis. But according to Cornell University, the birds form bonds in their first year, and remain monogamous for the rest of their lives, if both survive.
Around our apartment, we also get a good number of crows, cawing about, making noises, and dirtying our cars with their poop.
Crows are actually pretty intelligent animals, and if you’ve seen videos of them solving puzzles, you’d know exactly how smart they are.
Fun Fact: Crows will sometimes perform ‘Anting’. Anting happens when a crow rubs ants all over its feathers and skin to get rid of parasites. Ants can also sometimes get birds drunk by releasing acid from their bodies.
We also noticed a few Rock Pigeons around our areas, because our neighbours do feed them seeds every now and then.
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It’s safe to say the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra is not for everyone, especially if you’re not used to stretching your hands to reach the bottom of the screen. It comes with a price to match the size—but with the specs to back it up, especially in the camera department.
Speaking of the massive 6.9-inch display, my mom said it was nice to watch videos with, but too big to be used regularly and comfortably. The Galaxy S20 is probably a better option for her instead.
At least in this movement restricted times, we still have the technology to kill time with. This experiment was actually a pleasant bonding experience with my mum, and I got to have a peek into her head and see what she’s interested in while we’re all in close quarters here.
