I write this from the shiny Coolsmartphone HQ which, as you know, is my kitchen. On Friday afternoon I got back from work to find that my son had downloaded Pokemon Go. He’d seem it on TV and got it.
He’s a bit young and I didn’t want him to go out alone, so I figured we’d go out before bed time to try and hunt down some Pokemon characters.
It was astonishing. I’m not making this up now, but we walked past two kids within 100 yards of leaving our house that were playing it. They pointed out a “Pokestop” which.. well, I have no idea. I think it’s some sort of shop or free item drop. Lord knows. It seems to keep the kids happy. Anyway, we headed towards this Pokestop, which happened to be a local church just a short distance from our house. There, we saw two more kids sat on the wall outside. They were waving their phones around and you could tell they were both playing the game but then, from around the corner, four more kids appeared doing a similar thing. All of them zoned in towards the church. It was a properly weird sight. I’ve never seen so many kids hanging around outside a church, especially not our little local church.
Here’s a quick pic I took – I’ve made it a bit blurry because, well.. they’re kids. There’s a group of four and other two are off camera.
Today though, the infamous in-app purchase raised its’ ugly head. We ran out of those ball things, and it cost something like 79p for another 20 balls. Gahhh..
Either way, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an app so publicly popular. The adults are walking around, crossing roads without looking whilst they check Facebook and the kids are doing the same with Pokemon.
The only thing that I have found is the fact that the servers have been a little temperamental, with my son unable to play the game yesterday afternoon at all.