The iPhone

Having a functional iPhone in your house is very disconcerting. Even in the store it’s easy enough to just pass it off as futuristic technology that is somehow being temporarily presented to us cave-dwellers in the past.

But when you take it from your pocket and slap it on your Hi-Fi …
And it’s much smaller than your iPod video …
But much more capable and incredible than your iPod nano …
And your old cell phone looks like a relic from Soviet Russia …

… well what a time to be alive.

It’s easy to watch all the movies on Apple.com/iPhone but having one in your hand is another matter.

Holland even remarked it’s amazing to have one with personal content instead of what’s loaded on them in the store. (Not to mention that they’re tethered down there).

Everything is as advertised. What a bold statement in this age of good demos and lousy products.

After a fun while on the iPhone, I can hardly bear to scroll normally in Safari. Why can’t i just point my finger and flick around?

I was at Barnes & Noble for a minute and their computer screens for browsing music confused me since it seemed like I could just flick the list up and down, but nothing happened when I tried.

We went down to the pool tonight for a swim but brought my iPhone since there is supposedly a free wireless network down there. I didn’t find it (but there are more than 2 dozen locked down neighbor networks).

Even so, the EDGE cell network was enough to literally “Wow” the kids and their IBM-employed parents who wandered by and wondered is that actually an iPhone? Holland gave a good tour.

Well the one 6 year old boy was unhappy that his favorite YouTube video wasn’t available on the phone. Give it a week, kid.

Their mother was very wary about letting the kids play with my expensive toy but I’ve seen the beating they can take and I wasn’t worried. This might be the first durable iPod. Aside from the Shuffles.

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Jesse doesn’t think the iPhone will amount to much. I think his main idea is that anyone could have created the iPhone.

This is strange because I think nobody but Apple could have created the iPhone.

For example, if Motorola or LG or Sony/Ericsson sold you a phone, how willing would you be to take it home unopened and unactivated, and work through all the activation using their software on your own computer?

Would you even have their software on your home computer? Since you didn’t, would you allow it?

If (or … even since) you bought a phone from a company aside from Apple, do you ever connect it to your own computer? Why not?

Any modern phone can sync to a personal computer but it’s a big hassle. The iPhone doesn’t work at all unless it syncs to your home computer.

This isn’t a weakness, and it’s not by accident. The iPhone fits into the same peripheral consciousness that 100 million people have carved out for their iPods. We’ve all gotten used to iPods. They just work. If an iPhone was just an iPod that also makes phone calls, I’d already be hooked. But it’s more than that too. It’s a next-generation iPod that doesn’t exist yet that also makes phone calls. Oh shit. No wonder I’ll be 500th in line tomorrow at 4PM.

The iPhone seems to have the same features as competing phones but it is so much easier to accomplish these things (get on the web, text message) that the competitors might as well not even have them at all.

I’ve used the same lousy cell phone for 3 years only because I couldn’t figure out what would be so great about getting a new one. Tomorrow I know what’s so great about it.

(I hope to Steve God my iPhone will survive so long with no attention, no service, and no problems.)

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Howdy

I’m Paul. I live in Texas, but I used to live for quite a while in New Jersey.

Here’s a new blog based on WordPress instead of the Movable Type system I used for my previous efforts. My older blog and my travelogue are linked to the right and should still work normally. I haven’t decided whether or how to integrate them into WordPress. But they probably shouldn’t stay stuck in that ancient installation of Movable Type forever. Does WordPress support multiple blogs with one installation? It doesn’t seem to.

On the surface WordPress seems more modern than Movable Type. But I’m comparing MT 2.661 which is over three years old. I first looked at WordPress from a library in Canberra, Australia in May of 2004 and I didn’t think it was up to my needs back then.

I like that WordPress is published with PHP. This means the web pages are created dynamically by the web server whenever they are requested. My use of Movable Type required manually rebuilding portions of the web site as static html files whenever their content changed in the back-end database.

On the other hand I was starting to get a little fancy with MT templates and stuff towards the end of my Asian travels, so I have a lot to learn about WordPress. In addition you can easily spot this site as WordPress, so I hope someday to come up with a more disguised and interesting theme of my own.

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