iPhixation.
Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
If it doesn’t moderate the weather or advance criminal indictments against Dick Cheney, what possible use could it be?
—from ‘Redneck’ on the Textdrive user forum.
Well, exactly. Maybe it’s because it’s so hot. Maybe it’s because we’re having to deal with insurance junk on our old car and add-on games with our new one. But to somehow go through all of this during the apparent extended national holiday known as iPhone week just kinda makes life for me all the more bizarre.
To quickly sum up: yeah, I love the design…it’s easily the most spectacular breakthrough in UI design since the Mac in 1984. The downsides can absolutely be attached to the deal with the devil now known as AT&T that Jobs struck. Charge em up the wazoo for SMS? Sure. Slow cell data speeds? Sure. Stuff like that keeps me away from joining the rest of the world: I think I’ll remain mobile-less a bit longer.
I’d buy a phone-less (and therefore AT&T-less) iPhone in a New York minute, however.
In the meantime, it’s fun to read blogs that discuss the various pluses and minuses of the überdevice, and of course I read all the early reviews, and very much enjoyed, in spite of myself, NYTer David Pogue’s satiric look at the cloak of secrecy Apple drapes over their new baby in the wild—and the video-review manages to get the main points out there as well. It’s, dare I say it, almost Daily Show-ish. Yes, play the video! Sit through the ad!
I just hope we’re not going through one of those silly summers again where our national attention (such as it is) is captivated by something trivial only to to be struck, hard by a fresh, cold, jolt of reality in the fall. You know, like in September of 2001.
Truth is, all those horrors are still out there in the world, happening now, happening daily. D’ja read the four part article on Cheney in the Washington Post? Well, call that up on your iPhone Safari browser and a startlingly cool breeze might just whistle through the halls of whatever branch(es) of government the veep thinks he’s in these days. There? See? iPhone useful.
UPDATE 4:30 PM eastern:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office Wednesday for documents relating to President Bush’s controversial eavesdropping program that operated warrant-free for five years.
Did I mention that Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, the committee chairman, my senator for a brief moment in the mid-70s, a guy I interviewed in my first newspaper job…did I mention that I’m so proud of how he’s standing up to the Bush administration? Well, give that man an iPhone.
