I'm Still Not a Gadget Guy
I have an iPhone.
I've never set out to be any kind of trendsetter. When people all start buying the hottest thing, I don't usually go in on it. Not because I don't want it, but it's usually a money thing. The hottest thing is often the most expensive. I also don't like waiting in line and possibly getting in fights with people over the last item on the shelf. So you'll never see me outside a Best Buy at 5AM waiting for the hot gadget-of-the-month.
I was quite content with my Blackberry, even though it was starting to show its age... and in Blackberry years, 2 years old is aging. The battery was dying faster, so that was going to have to be replaced soon. I've heard that sometimes it's just easier to get a new phone than a new battery, but the clincher for me came when they decided to stop making app updates for my model. Yeah, that's right... planned obsolescence didn't happen so much as forced obsolescence. You see, Blackberry makes about a thousand different models of phone, so a Curve 9350 may not have the same capabilities as a Curve 9570, even though it's still a Blackberry Curve, and you probably couldn't tell the two apart. But it makes all the difference when they decide to make certain apps work with certain models. And in my case, the latest edition of App World was apparently too good for my model of phone.
I actually considered just getting a newer Blackberry and switching networks, but quite frankly, all of the commercials about speed and coverage are just a lot of hooey (that's a technical term). I live in a major metropolis, where all of the major carriers come in loud and clear... and yet I still lose calls. I doubt this would change from one network to the next. Therefore, I stayed with my carrier of choice and decided it was time to see what all the iPhone fuss was about. I have slowly been converting to a Mac lifestyle in recent years, and it just makes sense to be consistent. And speaking of consistency, an iPhone 4 is an iPhone 4... it's not a iPhone Curve or an iPhone Torch or an iPhone Bold. The biggest difference between the iPhone 4 I got and the top-of-the-line model (the iPhone 4S) is Siri. You all know about Siri... she's your "personal assistant", who answers all those crucial life questions, such as "Is that rain?" and how to avoid turning your gazpacho into "hot-spacho." However, Siri was going to cost me an extra $100. And how much was I really going to use Siri? After playing around with goofy questions and a curse word or two, I'd lose interest. Not worth $100.
All of this goes back to the fact that I am just not a gadget guy. I said the same thing when I got my Blackberry in 2010. Smartphones are toys, plain and simple. Most of the things you can do on a smartphone you can do on other things. Pretty much the only thing I cannot do on another electronic device is CALL SOMEONE. Ya know, on the phone. And text, of course. But they do have their advantages... I originally got a smartphone to have something that would play my music, and a smartphone acts as a combination of a phone and a MP3 player. Add in radio apps and you can listen to just about any radio station that streams online.
Ah yes, the apps. These are what really make a smartphone a toy. For one thing, you can play games on them... you can. I don't. The last thing I need is to get pulled into a time suck like Angry Birds; I have enough problems limiting my usage of Farmville and Mafia Wars. And then there are the apps you get because you think you'll use them, and you don't. Sure if it's free, it's not like you wasted your money, but I thought it would be cool to have Skype on my Blackberry, and then I never once used it. I just downloaded Instagram for my iPhone. I don't know if I'll ever use it. Maybe I will, but not terribly often. Now is it nice to have a camera in my phone? Sure. I mean I like to take my camera when I know I will be taking pictures of things, but just last evening, I decided to walk through the Society Hill section of Philadelphia, and it wasn't planned, so I broke out the iPhone to take pictures of some of the better sights.
However, taking a picture with the iPhone isn't the easiest thing in the world, because you have to zoom in with your fingers on the touch screen, and this doesn't always work. That makes it tough to get a picture that may only be there for a few seconds. I'll admit that once I got the iPhone, I spent much of the first day lamenting the things that it couldn't do that my old Blackberry could. I soon realized that this was a relatively short list. And the ability to zoom is nice on webpages and such. But back to my earlier point... I take my MacBook with me most places I go. I certainly use it all the time at home and at work. Therefore, most of the things I could do with my iPhone are things I would only do on my iPhone if I was too lazy to walk over to my laptop. So I spent much of the first couple weeks of iPhone ownership not using the thing much. But a new toy is a new toy, and no matter what age you are, you can always find the time to play with your toys. Just not when you should be working... unless it is for work. That's another problem with a smartphone. You need it to call people for work, and to check e-mail for work... and then 5 seconds later, it becomes a toy again.
We media scholars are quite contradictory... I tweet about Richard Dawson's passing with "Match Game" references, and watch the PBS "American Masters" documentary about Johnny Carson while downloading iPhone apps. I have one foot planted firmly in the 21st century, and another somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s. And I like it that way.
I've never set out to be any kind of trendsetter. When people all start buying the hottest thing, I don't usually go in on it. Not because I don't want it, but it's usually a money thing. The hottest thing is often the most expensive. I also don't like waiting in line and possibly getting in fights with people over the last item on the shelf. So you'll never see me outside a Best Buy at 5AM waiting for the hot gadget-of-the-month.
I was quite content with my Blackberry, even though it was starting to show its age... and in Blackberry years, 2 years old is aging. The battery was dying faster, so that was going to have to be replaced soon. I've heard that sometimes it's just easier to get a new phone than a new battery, but the clincher for me came when they decided to stop making app updates for my model. Yeah, that's right... planned obsolescence didn't happen so much as forced obsolescence. You see, Blackberry makes about a thousand different models of phone, so a Curve 9350 may not have the same capabilities as a Curve 9570, even though it's still a Blackberry Curve, and you probably couldn't tell the two apart. But it makes all the difference when they decide to make certain apps work with certain models. And in my case, the latest edition of App World was apparently too good for my model of phone.
I actually considered just getting a newer Blackberry and switching networks, but quite frankly, all of the commercials about speed and coverage are just a lot of hooey (that's a technical term). I live in a major metropolis, where all of the major carriers come in loud and clear... and yet I still lose calls. I doubt this would change from one network to the next. Therefore, I stayed with my carrier of choice and decided it was time to see what all the iPhone fuss was about. I have slowly been converting to a Mac lifestyle in recent years, and it just makes sense to be consistent. And speaking of consistency, an iPhone 4 is an iPhone 4... it's not a iPhone Curve or an iPhone Torch or an iPhone Bold. The biggest difference between the iPhone 4 I got and the top-of-the-line model (the iPhone 4S) is Siri. You all know about Siri... she's your "personal assistant", who answers all those crucial life questions, such as "Is that rain?" and how to avoid turning your gazpacho into "hot-spacho." However, Siri was going to cost me an extra $100. And how much was I really going to use Siri? After playing around with goofy questions and a curse word or two, I'd lose interest. Not worth $100.
All of this goes back to the fact that I am just not a gadget guy. I said the same thing when I got my Blackberry in 2010. Smartphones are toys, plain and simple. Most of the things you can do on a smartphone you can do on other things. Pretty much the only thing I cannot do on another electronic device is CALL SOMEONE. Ya know, on the phone. And text, of course. But they do have their advantages... I originally got a smartphone to have something that would play my music, and a smartphone acts as a combination of a phone and a MP3 player. Add in radio apps and you can listen to just about any radio station that streams online.
Ah yes, the apps. These are what really make a smartphone a toy. For one thing, you can play games on them... you can. I don't. The last thing I need is to get pulled into a time suck like Angry Birds; I have enough problems limiting my usage of Farmville and Mafia Wars. And then there are the apps you get because you think you'll use them, and you don't. Sure if it's free, it's not like you wasted your money, but I thought it would be cool to have Skype on my Blackberry, and then I never once used it. I just downloaded Instagram for my iPhone. I don't know if I'll ever use it. Maybe I will, but not terribly often. Now is it nice to have a camera in my phone? Sure. I mean I like to take my camera when I know I will be taking pictures of things, but just last evening, I decided to walk through the Society Hill section of Philadelphia, and it wasn't planned, so I broke out the iPhone to take pictures of some of the better sights.
However, taking a picture with the iPhone isn't the easiest thing in the world, because you have to zoom in with your fingers on the touch screen, and this doesn't always work. That makes it tough to get a picture that may only be there for a few seconds. I'll admit that once I got the iPhone, I spent much of the first day lamenting the things that it couldn't do that my old Blackberry could. I soon realized that this was a relatively short list. And the ability to zoom is nice on webpages and such. But back to my earlier point... I take my MacBook with me most places I go. I certainly use it all the time at home and at work. Therefore, most of the things I could do with my iPhone are things I would only do on my iPhone if I was too lazy to walk over to my laptop. So I spent much of the first couple weeks of iPhone ownership not using the thing much. But a new toy is a new toy, and no matter what age you are, you can always find the time to play with your toys. Just not when you should be working... unless it is for work. That's another problem with a smartphone. You need it to call people for work, and to check e-mail for work... and then 5 seconds later, it becomes a toy again.
We media scholars are quite contradictory... I tweet about Richard Dawson's passing with "Match Game" references, and watch the PBS "American Masters" documentary about Johnny Carson while downloading iPhone apps. I have one foot planted firmly in the 21st century, and another somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s. And I like it that way.
Labels: technology
posted by Dave | 9:32 PM
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