Sunday, September 23, 2007

The iphone drama

Yes, the iphone. It has been the talk of the town since June. Although I had not seen one in person, I wanted one. I never bought a PDA. I wanted to wait until the day I could easily do everything on one device, most notably:

* talk on the phone
* surf the web
* read email
* listen to music

I stress the word easily. The iphone is the first thing I've seen that lives up to this dream. I tried a few of the Smart phones such as the 8525 and 3125 from Cingular. They were, to say the least, difficult to work with. The 8525 sucked as a phone, and pretty bulky. The 3125 just wasn't too usable except as a phone, and it was sluggish.

Now that the price came down considerably, I ordered my iphone. It will be arriving next week. Also, I got a hold of a friend's iphone a few days ago and played with it. Although you could nitpick about a few things (3G, GPS, replaceable battery), even as a version 1.0 product it is MILES ahead of the pack. This has to be, by far, the most profound gadget in history.

I gave it the girlfriend test. She uses a Mac for Safari, Mail, and Microsoft Word. By no means is she a gadget user. I handed her the iphone and said, "Go to catster, look up your cat." She did it on her own, and quite easily. No coaching, no prior use or guidance of the iphone. Then I gave her my 3125 and said do the same thing. It took her at least a couple minutes to figure out how to use the soft-keys. Then she found the web browser, I had to help her a bit to get the URL prompt up. She did know how to punch in letters, she must have SMS'd before. But she couldn't figure out how to type a period "." without some help. Now as far as viewing the page in mobile IE, well let's just stop there.

No, I'm not a mac geek. I've used Macs, and I like them. I have a Mac at home. But I still use Ubuntu and Windows primarily. Why? A few reasons, but mostly because the poker clients I use are not available on a Mac. Poker Stars, are you listening?

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