iPhone lust and love

August 27, 2008



I’m a Mac fanatic. This should be clear by my blatant Windoze bashing and my inordinately high opinion of God Jobs and his minions.

Apple is a fantastic company that is probably as grimy and dirty and heinous behind it’s castle walls as any other company, save Enron and the Clinton household (tell me that’s not an organization).

And one of the best things they did was introduce the iPhone. Since the moment it was announced, I’ve been lusting after this fine, pretty and function piece of technology.

Alas and alack, I’m locked into a devil’s pact with Verizon…on three levels. I have a wired phone (this soon will change), I have a cell phone (locked in for another year) and I have a USB720 modem for my Macbook. This has prevented me from jumping to the iPhone for LARGE financial reasons and it’s been eating me up inside.

But now I’ve thrown caution to the wind and made the jump. I found a good deal on a first generation 4GB iPhone on Craigslist. I survived a trip into a hail of gunfire to pick it up. Now I’ve had it almost a week and I can’t imagine my life without it.

This is probably what having an offspring is like (and with my man-child behavior might be as close as I should get). I’m so totally focused on the iPhone that I’ve forsaken blogging for the better part of a week.

Sure, I was away in Boston and in New York, but I put up 200 blog posts in two weeks while I was in Paris last year…so what makes this different?

I think it’s the connectivity. Or should I say the appearance of being connected without actually having ‘true’ connections. What am I talking about? Twitter, IM, email, Facebook, LinkedIn and other services where you can just touch the surface of a topic or brush by a person and then give yourself credit for enriching their lives while holding up your end of the social pact we all buy into.

Being endlessly connected to my followers and friends has made it easy for me to procrastinate. It’s made time pass quickly whilst I buried my head in the glory of PetPupz. And it’s kept me entertained while spending some large portions of the weekend interacting with a seven year old and a four year old.*

*Both amazing children, but they’re way smarter and more energetic than I am so I often needed some alone time with the iPhone to recharge.

Let me back up for a moment. The iPhone will become a productivity tool and an amazing way for me to get my work done, but right now the shine is still firmly on its sleek glass screen and silver, metal body.

What’s it do for me? You name it. I can…

• email from anywhere

• find out information on anything from anywhere

• talk with friends

• play games

• watch movies

• watch YouTube

• listen to music, audio books and podcasts

• write blog entries (I didn’t quite make use of this the last six days…sorry)

• read blog entries

• iChat or instant message

• take photos

• relax

That’s about it in a nutshell. The only challenges that lie ahead are figuring out what applications I want to add to the device and what plan or service I want to use with it. AT&T has horrible coverage and that’s probably the only mistake Apple made in this whole deal. But by doing so they’ve woken up a large constituent crowd that is not going to be as accepting of poor cell service in the future from companies that strongarm people into contracts.

What I really can’t wait for is Google’s nationwide Wifi plans.

If you’ve got iPhone questions, just leave them in the comments. Please ignore the disjointed nature of this post. As I spend more time away from the iPhone I get a little skittish … maybe it’s the DTs.

I LOVE this phone!

More to come…