Thursday, August 07, 2008

Ticket to the 21st Century

It was time to pick up my ticket to the 21st century. After work on Tuesday I hurried to the San Mateo Cingular office to pick up my new iPhone.

Quick reactions:

It allows me in good conscience finally to trash my three-year-old Samsung cellphone handset and five-year-old brick of an iPod. (The iPhone may pay for itself just through the savings on the wear and tear on my pants pockets.) But I don’t like the fact that the iPhone can’t link to our four-year-old Mac because the Mac’s operating system isn’t current. I don’t feel like being strong-armed into spending over $100 on OSX 10.4, so I’m using the Windows version of iTunes.

3G capability enables me to browse the Web wherever there is ATT cellular service, not just at Wi-Fi access points. I can check my e-mail on the train, which I can’t do with my laptop computer.

The touchscreen interface is intuitive, but I’m still having a lot of trouble thumbing text and e-mail messages on the tiny virtual keyboard (I’m composing this little commentary on a regular computer.)

Criticism of the phone’s 2MP camera falls on deaf ears. I’ve never had a phone with a camera before.

Battery life will be a problem. Leaving the iPhone on all day---and it's not even playing music--appears to drain most of its power. I know there are ways to save the battery, such as lowering the brightness on the screen, turning off 3G, etc. but I’d like not to have to be fiddling with the settings all the time.

And oh, yes, POTS (plain old telephone service) seems to function well. Reception is clearer than on my old phone.

A promising start to what I hope will be a beautiful relationship.

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