I’m ready to ditch my phone for good.
I won’t be able to for years and years, since we rely on them so much. I text all day like everyone else, and I rely on my phone to keep my organized and on schedule. At the same time, the phone is a ball and chain — we are tethered to it all day.
In recent years, I’ve noticed how there are glimmers of hope for all of us, that we won’t be constantly on our phones all day. One sign of that is the 2024 Nissan Rogue, which I tested for a week — without using my phone at all. The new Rogue lets you connect in other ways, to play music and set reminders for yourself, all using the Google suite of products.
I started out by controlling my music playback. Using the Google Assistant, I was able to ask the bot to play some of my favorite music. I did have to first login to the Spotify app on the Rogue, using the 12.3-inch display. I left my iPhone at home the whole time, though. Once I logged in, I could play just about any album or song just by voice command.
Next, I used Google Maps on the Rogue itself, not connected through a phone. It is liberating. It shows a future where we can not use our phones as much and still find directions and stay connected with each other, mostly by voice. I pulled over to use Google Maps a few times and found that it was really nice not to have to look up anything on my phone instead.
It doesn’t end there, though. My favorite thing to do in the Rogue was just to talk to the Google Assistant bot. I set reminders for myself, asked questions about the latest news, and even asked the bot to tell a few jokes. I would say this is not as unusual or different in terms of speaking to a bot, since you can do that with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay if you have your phone with you, and it does help you to focus more on driving.
At the same time, not having to keep my phone connected or charged, but still being able to complete tasks while driving, did make me think this is the future. In our homes, we will talk to bots and AI will do the heavy lifting of adjusting our schedules and even guiding us through our email by voice. While that is not really possible today, it will mean we can liberate ourselves even from laptops to some extent and our phones. Someday, we will have a personal assistant bot that manages our schedule and email for us, responding for us using AI and handling even complex tasks. Meanwhile, we might be driving and talking with passengers in a car, not having to pull over to a coffee shop just to type on a keyboard and answer our email.
That scenario might be a ways off, although AI is advancing very quickly. I just know I could sense how it all might work in the future while testing the Rogue, since I was able to at least do some of my tasks on the way to a remote office. The fact that I didn’t even have my phone with me felt odd at first — almost wrong in a way — but I still felt productive.
Another interesting discovery about the Rogue is that the 12.3-inch display is quite speedy. I was surprised to find it could zip through various apps and helped me navigate in Google Maps without the usual slowdowns or pauses in some vehicles. If the future is this smooth and doesn’t mean we need our phones as much, I’m all for it. The Rogue is proof positive.
