Explain It to Your Grandmother (literally) what I did when I was in Kyoto

Technology divide

My mom is now 77 years old. Since COVID she hasn't travelled much and her main activities is to walk around her apartment in Kobe, Japan.

It makes me worry more now that I am living in Vancouver, Canada.

I would call her every month or so, get on zoom so I can see her face. I would usually use the kids as an excuse to have the web meeting.

She is very persevering. In other words she doesn't ask for help when she needs it.

She had a 5 year old Windows PC that was starting to make the zoom call difficult. She also had a smartphone but....

(We got to actually use it, but gosh!! it was such a piece of junk! You had to press hard on the screen to have any button respond. Fujitsu, your product is awful!)

No function to do web calls. And she couldn't download and use Line (the equivalent of Whatsapp in Japan)

The hurdles

When I visited her in early July, she wanted to change her phone because Fujitsu will not support any maintenance. I thought this would be a good chance to introduce her to a proper smartphone.

Just because it would be easier to understand we got her an iPhone SE (3rd gen).

All you would need to do is set it up... you would guess... Not so fast!

Getting a SIM free iPhone

Getting an iPhone would be easy. But it turns out most iPhone sold in Japan are bundled with some telecom contract. We just wanted the iPhone.

So we had to go to Apple Store. And to my surprise, they don't have one in Kobe!

We decided to go to Kyoto, for the iPhone

Contract with the telecom

We needed to cancel her overpaid contract with Docomo (telecom service) and move her phone number to a new contract. We selected Povo because it was cheap, easy to use, and I have used it before.

But, since she didn't know her ID for Docomo we had to call customer service to do all this.

Getting a SIM

We only had 2 days to get everything set up so getting a physical SIM was not an option. Thankfully Povo had an eSIM option. We stayed at Starbucks for a while to have WiFi reception and downloaded Povo app, applied for an eSIM and waited for it to be activated.

Setting up LINE

Now, finally! We can download LINE and have her fidle with it!

But it turns out she had halfway-through set up LINE before so we couldn't create a new LINE account. I forgot how we managed to work around this but I needed to do some additional research.

Using LINE

Thanks to Fujitu's awful phone, she was educated to press hard on the screen to type or push buttons. The interaction with her iPhone was thus not so smooth.

At this point, I was a little tired so I let my elder son teach my mother how to use LINE and how to use the iPhone. (Good job, son!)

How it is going

Her life tends to be fixed in her comfortable routine. She doesn't do anything new. (My kids were shocked to know how her daily life was.)

The iPhone and LINE app has hopefully brought in some positive stimulus to push her out a bit from her fixed routine. Learning new things is good for the brain and keeps you young.

Our interactions have become daily and I have got my elder son involved as well.

Thank you technology!