Win an iPhone XR from PLAYR

You can enter the iPhone XR Giveaway from PLAYR for your chance to win an iPhone XR 64GB valued at $749 for the carrier of your choice and a one-year supply of GFuel Energy. You can earn extra entries by taking action on social media and more. Entry ends April 20, 2019.




I’ll bet you think Granny still uses one of those dumb phones, or maybe even rolls with a Jitterbug. Well I’ll have you smarty pants whipper snappers know that I had the original iPhone, and I had it 2 weeks after it came out. I was actually among the first people on the entire planet to have a smartphone! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

It was kind of serendipitous as I just happened to need to replace my phone at the time, which was one of those flip numbers. I had left it open and accidentally sat on it, which separated the halves and left it flipped open for good.

So I sauntered down to AT&T, which was my carrier at the time, to find a replacement. I really didn’t even know that the iPhone had been released, sure I had seen some commercials about it, but I hadn’t paid too much attention. When I got into the store I surveyed some of the hardware and right before I was going to decide on the latest T9 texting wonder, the sales associate said, in what I believe was a condescending manner “We’ll get you set up then, unless of course you want to go with an iPhone. We are one of the only stores in the country that has one in stock”.

I’m pretty sure he was making a joke because well, I’m old and at the time, iPhone was only for the savviest of geeks. However, I don’t take lightly to a challenge nor some snarky young salesman thinking I was too old to know about the coolest new tech on Earth, so I replied “Oh, I assumed you were sold out like everyone else, sure, let’s take a look at it” and the next thing I knew, I was walking out of the store as one of the first people in the entire world to dawn what would become the way of communicating in the future.

Frankly, I wasn’t really ready for it. Not so much using the phone, I mean I did have an Apple computer and the iOS operating system has been simple and streamlined right from the start. What I wasn’t prepared for, actually, was all the attention I was about to get. I couldn’t even whip my phone out at a restaurant without a waiter or another patron stopping to ask “Wow, is that an iPhone?”. If I used it in the streets people would stare, poke each other and point it out. And of course every one of my near and distant relatives had to play with it, ask about it, and tease me about having it.

I suppose now in retrospect, I might have liked the attention. For at least a solid year, I was the coolest Granny in the land. My kids, who were still using, I think it was called a Chocolate, the best T9 phones had to offer, really got a kick out of the fact that I had the tech-iest gadget available to man. I think the only downside was, at some point people started asking my advice about buying various tech items. Somehow the iPhone had made me an honorable member of the geek squad, and I wasn’t really the most qualified individual to be recommending technological purchases of all kinds.

I did go on to have the iPhone 3 and the iPhone 5 before bucking Apple altogether and heading down the Android road. As it stands now I have a 6 year old Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (they are currently on to Note 9!) and my days of being at the forefront of mobile computing are behind me. But it a glorious run, those few incredible months back in 2008 when I was living on the cutting edge, as a Granny with a gadget, before the word “gadget” was even on the map.

I want to wish all my fans and subscribers the best of luck to be the winner of this iPhone. I know there’s one of you out there who deserves to have the coolest new gadget and get the apropos attention that accompanies it.