Warning, rambling about dookie-time ahead. You have been warned!
I’m one of those people who doesn’t sit still really well unless my purpose is to sit still.
Therefore I’ve found that waiting in lines, dropping a deuce, waiting outside a campus building to pick up Lauren, etc, are times that I’m pretty bored.
That being said, I find myself stock-piling the bathroom with books and magazines, and have positioned the towel rack so that a laptop easily sits on it while I’m doing my business, so that I can stay occupied. In college Alex and I used to go out of our way to get our MP3 players, and sometimes books also, before proceeding to our thrown.
Also, the MP3 player used to be indispensable in lines. But still, I often wished I could carry some form of the internet with me, or books to go along with them. Also, to help pass the time. Sometimes MP3’s are not enough, especially when waiting to pick someone up outside a building.
Now, I could have had the mobile internet, and a pdf reader on my current phone 2+ years ago, but we were cheap – mobile internet is not, and I hate mobile browsers / mobile websites, and I picked a phone w/ a crappy type of memory card that is not common (my mistake).
So, anyway, you couple those things together, and you add in that my phone is starting to crash frequently, and you take away the cheap part (well, we are still cheap, but I will explain how we are paying for it in a moment), and you add in that I don’t like carrying all my mobile devices and charging cables in my bag everyday to work along with my laptop, and you get: iPhone time.
I believe Jesus died to give me something like the iPhone (at least that was part of the reason).
Let’s tick off Ben’s Pro’s / Con’s
Pros
- Jesus Loves Apple this last half-decade
- price went down – I asked for apple gift cards for his b-day totaling $200 (I heard the rumor prior to my b-day about the price drop 🙂
- Full-on browser w/ a decent tab-type interface for multiple pages
- Enough space for some e-books / pdfs, sermons and podcasts as well as some favorite albums, and a few videos
- time-wasting video games look cool
- there is decent guitar tuning software for it, as well as some cool music making software – kills time developing skills, and annoys people around me – BONUS
- consolidating our power connectors for mobile devices down to two types instead of three, and we already have many ipod cables around along w/ a few AC to DC bricks
- my 40 gig ipod would finally be just a portable hard drive w/ all my music on it – so it could mostly stay at work
- GPS helps keep Lauren from getting lost (this happens occasionally when she is going new places on the bus, and it generally frightens me, and yes we are thinking about getting two if we can afford it)
- app store – I like ubuntu because of the repository, the app store reminds me of this, I always hated trying to find phone software
- Much thinner than my current phone, and thinner than most full-featured phones out
- Could possibly control our robot wafer handler with it at work, which would amuse me
- I already have At&T, and think they don’t suck, and pay them more money than the phone and internet company combined
- I am looking for a phone that I can keep more than two years (I’m about on 3 w/ this one, and was on 4 w/ my last one), and I think this one looks tough enough to make it, and it is being readily upgraded which means it has the possibility of not being abandoned (my current phone was last updated in early ’06)
- I’ll always have it w/ me so the crapper and lines will be less boring, and I might actually catch up on my one-year bible reading this way
Cons
- $30 / month for a data plan / phone = $60 – my new internet plan costs that and is 3Mbs unrestricted (I just switched to Minneapolis Wifi – I was sick of paying $65 / month to comcast)
- This is the first expensive phone my wife has been interested in. Usually I can just research which phone will last (her’s is currently out-pacing mine in terms of just working w/o problems) and then buy the cheapest one of those for her, but not so this time
- No video recording, no video chat, 2 megapixel camera (mine is 1, and it is almost 3 years old), copy/paste still seems to be missing
- Heard the processor/RAM on the phone doesn’t handle multi-tasking well from Alex, who typically will have similar usage patterns to me
- I really like the click-wheel on the normal ipods – minor beef, but still
- Greatly fear dropping it anywhere where there could be water – it happened once w/ a friends MP3 player – but it still worked after it dried out
- not open source based, which hurts me deeply, but the openMoko phone isn’t out anytime soon (and it is way big comparitively) and the android phones all look a little thick so far, and not a one is out yet that impresses me as much (that last statement is subject to change if a sweet one does come out – my guess is that in two to four years I’ll want an android-based phone)
I think the pro’s have it.
So the 16GB iPhone, which was developed primarily by Jesus (who is not Steve Jobs) to fulfill my wishes to be less bored on the crapper, will likely be mine sometime late this summer or early in the fall – magic month is in August, so I’m guessing sometime around then.