Me and my iPhone
At the end of December, I had an unfortunate accident. Really, it was. My Motorola Razr, a cellphone I liked a lot, stayed in the pocket of my jeans on a trip through the washer. It emerged very clean and very dead.
I needed to get a replacement quickly. AT&T informed me that I wasn't far enough into my current two-year indenture to qualify for a discount on a replacement phone. That meant I would have to pay full retail price--about $330, as I recall--for a new Razr. Fortunately, the old one was insured for that much against just this eventuality. So I figured if I had to pay that much for a new phone, I might as well get what I really wanted, which was an Apple iPhone. $399 plus tax, plus $20 a month on top of my regular AT&T calling plan for the unlimited data access and messaging.
It would be better for my work as a journalist. Honestly. And much more cool.
The differences start from the moment you make your decision to buy. There are no discounts on the iPhone. You pay your money and get your phone, and then you take it home to activate. No standing around for half an hour in the store. You complete the sign-up from your home computer, including porting over your old number. It was really quite simple. I didn't even have to redo the voicemail.
So after a month, do I still like it? Very much, although as with any love affair, eventually you find a few things you don't like. Unlike a regular Mac using Apple Mail, there is no junkmail filter on the iPhone. That meant all the spam that is launched at my blog showed up on the iPhone, often dozens of them a day. Don't get me started on Russian spamsters. We may have won the Cold War, but they're paying us back with spam bombs. While unwanted e-mails can be removed quickly from the iPhone with the tap of a finger--nearly everything is controlled by the touchscreen--it got to be really annoying. I eventually asked my blogmaster to forward the blog mail to my G-mail address, which didn't forward to the iPhone. That took care of that problem.
The iPhone is also more difficult to answer in a moving car than the Razr was. Of course, the Razr was a flip phone, and to answer it you needed merely to open it up. No buttons to push. With the iPhone, I have to draw my finger across the screen to unlock it and then punch the touchscreen answer button, which doesn't always work the first time. My suggestion to Apple would be to have the phone unlock automatically when a call comes in.
And finally, I don't like the Apple address book software as much as the address book in my Palm Tungsten T-3, which was far easier to customize. I haven't yet figured out how to categorize the names and addresses in my iPhone, and there isn't a search function that I've been able to find. But perhaps that will change in the future. I'm ever hopeful.
On the good side, I love the ability to send and receive e-mail from just about anywhere. And there's nothing like the reaction that comes when people see the e-mail tag, "Sent From My iPhone." Blackberries, I believe, were the first to have this ego feature. I find the iPhone great to have when I'm covering stories for the Patriot-News and need to alert the desk that a story is or isn't coming. Instead of getting up to leave the meeting, I can whip out the iPhone and dash off an e-mail, provided I'm not in someplace like the East Wing of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, where there is no AT&T service at all.
I haven't found many places like that. The iPhone accesses the Internet and sends messages through free Wi-Fi connections or the AT&T Edge Network. It shifts seemlessly from one to the other depending on where you are. At home, it's Wi-Fi. At the office, it's Edge. The Internet access is great during the mind-numbing third hour of a night municipal meeting. a lot of what I do these days.
I find myself fetishizing the iPhone, obsessively wiping fingermarks off its glass (not plastic--it won't scratch) face so it looks shiny and new. I keep finding new things to do with it, but one thing I never do is leave it in my pants pocket. Every night, it goes on the charger. I don't want another washing machine accident ever again.