Yes… As of last night I too am a happy little pod-person.
I finally broke down and joined the teeming masses by purchasing my very own iPhone; the 16 gig variety even.
This replaces the generally ancient flip-phones I’ve had since my ‘starTAC’ made a perfect swan-dive from my hip into a puddle back in 1998 or so… Since then I was determined to use the cheapest phone possible with the fewest features possible as, for me at least, buying a very expensive phone was just asking for something bad to happen – which of course necessitated buying yet another very expensive phone.
Since that day I’ve generally used a cell phone costing less than $29… If I could get it free with service that was even better. And, interestingly enough, nothing ‘bad’ has ever happened to these cheap/free phones.
But I find I need a bit more these days than the generic cell phone offers – mostly because the features they offer are primarily aimed at kids: I don’t want the latest top-40 single as a ring tone, I don’t need MTV videos piped to the 1 inch screen in the phone, I have no use for texting plans that offer 5+ digit message counts, and I especially don’t need marketing tie-ins between my phone service and whatever the scientifically-derived “hip” thing of the hour is.
So, I could get a PDA I suppose, but only the terminally obsessive require a full blown PDA and while I’ve owned many over the years, I just don’t have enough ‘important’ data in my day-to-day existence to really use one. So I generally I wind up selling them off or giving them away a few months after I buy one.
There are ‘Blackberries’ too, but I don’t own nice enough clothes, enough stocks, work in sales or marketing, have a bluetooth tranceiver in each ear, or drive a Mercedes/BMW/Lexus – so I don’t think one would work for me.
Enter Steve Jobs (iGod) and his iPhone…
It’s a pretty nice phone all things considered. AT&T has good coverage and the Edge Network they offer doesn’t completely suck. The iPhone also has a lot of very nice features aimed squarely at the folks between points (A) (high schoolers) and (B) (people who have a summer/winter home in some other state).
The built in email system is very nice, the iPod functions are even better then the iPod, and having access to real internet web sites (not portal-based cell-phone microsites) is fantastic.
Now, there is one glaring error with the iPhone in my not-so-humble opinion – it’s a closed system, meaning you can’t run any software on it that it didn’t come with. And it was this error that prevented me from buying one when they came out.
But the other day the iGod finally wised up and decided to grace humanity with an SDK for the iPhone so that the world can write applications for it… So now I own one.
For those who list me in their phones my number is the same (ends with 2999) and I’m fairly sure I got everyone in my old phone transfered into the iPhone. So, nothing much should have changed.
So, with that, if anyone needs me I’ll be trying to think different enough to make all of the iFeatures in the iPhone iWork.
