Chuck_Klosterman, author and essayist wrote in Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs (great book, highly recommend it) about his experience playing The Sims. Chuck went in realizing that the objective is to keep your Sim alive and happy, but to his disgust, the primary way to increase SimChuck’s happiness was to buy stuff. Sims are extremely materialistic, way more than we real humans… right?
So, I was having a pretty bad week last week and decided when I saw no other clear path to pull myself out of my funk, to take the Sim approach. I went and bought myself an instant horcrux… I bought myself an iPhone.
Four of my co-workers have iPhone’s already, and I have to admit the phone envy was getting pretty powerful. But, the true tipping point was how my current phone recoiled when it knew competition was looming.
In one day, my phone dropped three calls, refused to connect until I was completely outside the building, and while displaying over 4 hours of battery remained, the phone shut itself down after 20 minutes.
So I bought myself one, switched from Sprint to AT&T and haven’t looked back. In the five days I’ve had it, I have used my new phone as a phone, an iPod, a digital camera, a photo album, a calendar, an address book, notepad, a map, an alarm clock, a countdown timer, a stopwatch, a weather alert, a calculator and a web browser.
While the iPhone if very cool and fun to play with, I can’t say I’d recommend it to everyone. It is still waaaay to expensive for a cell phone (thank you for subsidizing Motley Fool), and unless you are of the personality type of a power user that is ready and willing to use the iPhone for all its robust features, then it wouldn’t be worth it. But if you are, go get yourself one; you’ll be glad you did.
I admit I’m very curious, but likely won’t be in the market for one until they’re on like version 3.0. I’d like to know all the kinks are worked out.
(And god willing, they will expand beyond just AT&T service.)
Thanks for letting me test-drive your new toy! I like how the screen knows which way you’re holding it- that’s just crazy… and the regular internet is definitely an enormous step up from regular cell phone internet… enticing : ) But, the price needs to be cut in about thirds.
Here’s a great feature, I didn’t realize til we needed it. Google Maps (a built-in feature of the iPhone) are way more detailed than regular maps, and display local roads. This was extremely useful to skirt around the beach traffic coming home this weekend.
Hey, good stuff! It took us a long time to get home… but all in all for Labor Day it really wasn’t as bad as it could have been- and at least it was all spread out, and didn’t really have us stopped or anything except for in one specific podunk place where the fire department was having a chicken BBQ!