I Will not Cower Before Techno-Bill
December 6th, 2008My Phone is Good Enough and Smart Enough
My experience as a smartphone owner is going well. I figured out how to schedule repeating obligations in Outlook, and I managed to fix my computer so it will sync with my Blackjack II. And I am learning to enjoy scheduling tasks on the fly. Look at this picture, which shows you how I am managing my hectic schedule, which is packed with momentous events.
I’ll tell you how that happened. I grabbed Maynard from his cage yesterday, and as I felt his claws penetrating my fingers, I realized it was time to get out the clippers. So I made an appointment. As we sat down on the couch to read Bill Hylton’s Ultimate Guide to the Router Table, I noticed that a bulb in the ceiling fan fixture was out. So I entered that, too.
At some point later today, the phone will begin nagging me. It’s like being married, only without the disappointing infrequent sex. The phone will tell me to get off my fat behind and fix the bulb. And I’ll hit the snooze button, giving myself another hour. Then it will start yapping at me again. More snooze. More yapping. More snooze. Finally I’ll tell the phone, “I’m only doing this to make you shut your hole,” and I’ll go get the ladder.
Then the phone and I will avoid communicating for a while, which I will interpret as peace, and the phone will interpret as proof that I never loved it to begin with. I don’t care. Listen, if the phone really cared about me, it would have come with a touch screen. You don’t have to hit me with a ton of bricks. I get the message.
George Moneo sent me a horrified email, reading “What? You didn’t buy an iPhone?!” I am pretty sure he was kidding. Let’s check AT&T’s site and find out why I didn’t buy an iPhone, apart from the idiotic, pretentious, ungrammatical tiny “i” in front of the capital “P.”
Okay. That was fast. The cheapest…CHEAPEST…Iphone (ha) plan is seventy dollars per month, before the added crap that rounds it up to a hundred dollars. My God, George. What are you smoking? And the real Iphone (the one that has more memory) is $300, with a two-year contract. Good Lord. I assume George’s wife has seen the bills. If not, sorry, George. You can sleep in my garage for a while.
Let’s do the math. Right now I pay $29 (really ~$40) per month. The Iphone is at least $30 more. Multiply by 24 months. It’s over 700 dollars. In real life, I’ll bet it’s more like a thousand. That’s not a thousand, total. That’s a thousand on top of the thousand I’ll be paying on my current plan.
In return, I get…
Okay, that part is not clear.
You can put music on the Iphone. But I can do that, too. Except I don’t want to. MP3 players are only for desperate times, like when you’re flying across the country, and you need something to drown out the screaming babies. The rest of the time, they’re a pain. And I have a great MP3 player that holds 40 gigs. Twice the capacity of the Iphone. It already has dozens of albums in it.
You can watch TV on the Iphone. I can do that on the Blackjack. Except I don’t want to. I don’t watch regular TV on a big screen. Why would I watch it on a tiny one I have to hold up in front of me?
I’m trying to watch the Iphone tour video. It’s some wuss in a black shirt. Why do post-2000 hippies insist on wearing black all the time? Maybe this is an old unwashed shirt that belonged to Steve Jobs. Maybe this guy wears it, hoping it has residue from The Force on it.
It’s so boring…it’s actually painful…help me…Ibuprofen…Vicodin…heroin…
I had to turn it off. It’s half an hour long! Who could sit through that?
Truthfully, I already feel like I bought too much phone. I wish I could have gotten a regular non-smart phone, plus a $75 PDA, but I couldn’t do that, because I refuse to add any more weight to my pockets. I keep my hair short, I have never owned a ring or necklace, and I resent it when I have to wear socks. I don’t need more junk hanging off me. The weight of my pistol is very annoying. I’m not adding any more heavy items.
When this PC craps out, I fully intend to go Apple, more out of anger at Microsoft than love for Steve Jobs. Windows has gotten so bad and so stupid, there is no possibility that Apple could be anything but better. But I wouldn’t buy an Iphone if I were a billionaire.
December 6th, 2008 at 10:30 AM
Boy, are you right about weight. I have a Palm and a phone and a gun.
I had to relearn some stuff. Like gun in right pocket instead of keys. Keys, etc. in left pocket (and I’m right handed). Phone in pouch on belt or left shirt pocket at work. PDA in right shirt pocket at work or jacket in cooler weather or pouch in summer (and that looks geeky).
But I’m not paying for that data plan.
And work just lowered the reimbursement for phone so I just dropped minutes off my plan. It’s like an effective cut in pay, but we’re all doing our part to stay solvent.
December 6th, 2008 at 10:37 AM
“Listen, if the phone really cared about me, it would have come with a touch screen.”
Should’ve gotten the Epix instead.
December 6th, 2008 at 10:53 AM
iPhone: The. Best. Evah!
December 6th, 2008 at 10:57 AM
You will not regret the Apple route. How many years did I sit typing pathos about Apple? And what goes everywhere with me now? Yup. I’m a hypocrite, but at least I’m recovering.
December 6th, 2008 at 12:07 PM
I was forced by my company to “upgrade” to the ATT “Tilt” (don’t get me started on stupid marketing names). I previously had a Nokia 6820 that I was very happy with, but the company wanted me on 3G because the minutes were cheaper (they pay forme to have a cellphone so our customers can call me at all hours).
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Personally, I am not impressed. Windows Mobile crashes at least twice a week (often during a call, so the call is dropped). It wouldn’t import the Nokia’s SIM Contact List (it hung up during the transfer, forcing another soft reset); I had to enter a very extensive contact list by hand over several days. And I HATE the small little “OK” touch screen buttons. I haven’t installed ANY software on the phone, so the frequent crashes are unforgivable.
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This phone was made for Urban Yuppies that never drive a car. It needs two hands to do anything on the phone.
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In comparison, my wife upgraded her tMobile (yes a small “T”…sorry Steve) phone to a slim-profile Nokia (not Windows Mobile!) and the whole process took 5-minutes (including copying the contact list from the old SIM card). The Nokia just works. Period.
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I’m an engineer (which might make you think I’m in love with gadgets), but I’m mostly interested in effeciency. A cellphone should be a cellphone FIRST and a toy second. Right now, all of the smart-phones seem to be toys (or PDA’s) first and phones second. ( A case in point: it takes me three menu “clicks” to turn on the speakerphone option when I’m on a call when the blue-tooth headset attached…how stupid is THAT?)
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Someone may ask why I didn’t stay with Nokia for 3G; the reason was that there were no 3G Nokia phones that were International Capable (I travel overseas a lot). The only phones offered in this category were SmartPhones and all but two had the Blackberry style QWERTY keyboard (which I also hate), so I was stuck.
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BTW, I have not enabled the GPS on the phone and I don’t intend to; I have plenty of GPS units already.
December 6th, 2008 at 1:07 PM
I have this thirty buck LG phone that has a color screen and four different chimes. I can visit the internet on it, supposedly, but it costs a fortune (I use Virgin Mobile for my phone provider), and why would I want to go on the internet with my phone when I have a computer? I can call people from it and send text to my Twitter page, which I’ve done exactly twice.
I never use schedulers. I don’t schedule things.
December 6th, 2008 at 7:52 PM
I generally like my AT&T Tilt – but pretty much everything JeffW says was/is true for me as well. The difference in ur perceptions and level of satisfaction may be that I have activelt hated every cell phone I had previously and the Tilt is merely sort of disappointing/irritating in several regards. I think if it were not MicroSlop WinMobile based, it might actually rise to the level of satisfactory. I need the PDA/phone and some of its capabilites due to a modicum of business travel, so I accaept it as a necessary evil (and I hapen to absolutely love the QWERTY keyboard of the Tilt – it is why I went with that particular phone).
December 6th, 2008 at 10:07 PM
Today I “accidentally” overwrote my kids laptop with Ubuntu linux, other than the inital complaint about losing their files (stupid YouTube links) they caught right up and were where they were. Check it out you can get a live cd of ubuntu (or just put it on a usb stick, 2gb $5 at walmart) and see, it’s a software freedom you have never had. Linux has come a long way since i started in the early 90’s and it supports almost everything.
MikeC
December 7th, 2008 at 1:11 AM
“What are you smoking?”
Never ask that question of a Jobs-o-phile. You probably don’t want to know the answer.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:57 AM
I have an OLD Virgin mobile phone (since, oh, 1999 or so). B&W. You have to put $20 on it every 90 days to keep it active; but the time accumulates (and never expires) …they used to let me do $60 a year, dunno what happened. At this point, the account has a several hundred minutes in accumulated time. It’s a great little phone for emergencies. I’ve used it maybe twice in the last five years. It does receives text (it would be too much a PITA to want to send text; numeric keypad only). It’s light, it’s tiny, it works …and it has far-and-away been the cheapest “plan” for a non-user of any plan out there. Of course, a typical phone call to me is “Yeah. Sure. When? OK. Bye.” Click.
December 7th, 2008 at 12:23 PM
“iPhone: The. Best. Evah!”
How’s that cut’n’paste working out for you?
December 7th, 2008 at 2:12 PM
Okay, km, I do like the keyboard (somewhat…it could be better…the access to the top row of keys is hard if you have big fingers like me). But I found the keyboard on my 6820 better, and it never crashed.
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If I used the PDA features more that might counterbalance some of my bad experience, but since my company has secure email (meaning I can’t use the email on phone feature), and the company won’t pay for data minutes, I only use the phone for calls and text messages. In that capacity, the warts stand way way out.
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Glad it works for you though…
December 7th, 2008 at 10:07 PM
“A cellphone should be a cellphone FIRST and a toy second.”
All one needs to mention is that AT&T’s bars all serve booze, and in UT there aint many bars!
They forced me to upgrade last Jan, by killing al the CSMA towers/service. So far I get about 25% of the availability I USED to have!
AT&T used to drop a call now and again, no biggie. With their new and improved service I can almost guarantee that no call will actually be finished by the participants. Oh and at home, I’m two miles straight clear line of site to a tower!
Today’s devices scare the crap outta me, well not exactly fear, but they do so many things well, except, allow you to actually talk to somebody!
December 8th, 2008 at 7:27 AM
T-Mobile prepaid. $50/yr for 400 minutes or $100/yr for 1000 minutes that roll over if you don’t use them.
Get an iPod Touch instead of an iPhone. It has virtually everything that’s on the phone except for a camera, which my phone has. No monthly charges, more memory than the iPhone.
December 9th, 2008 at 1:52 AM
Real quick ’cause I’m sure you’ve heard this before: try Linux before Mac. Mac OS is a Unix distro on really, really expensive hardware. Put three hours into learning linux (which you’ll have to do with a mac anyway) and save yourself a grand. The part of you that enjoys buying tools will appreciate it.
(I’m not a Linux hardcore type; I keep a windows machine around for some stuff and my graphic designer wife still runs XP, ’cause it’s a pain in the ass to install Photoshop and Illustrator on Linux, but no less so for a Mac, unless you have massive cash laying around.) All around it’s slightly more of a nuisance, but much more rewarding, way, way the hell less expensive, and as good or better than a Mac.
I’m writing this from a HP notebook running Ubuntu, which I love. I do recommend Ubuntu, and you can feel free to send issues to my email if you want to give it a shot.