One quarter with iPhone
Oct. 14th, 2008 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progMore iPhone thoughts, while it's on my mind:
I've been an iPhone user for three months now. Before I bought it, I imagined it would act as a convergence of my iPod and my cell phone, meaning one fewer thing stuffed in my pocket.
What I didn't expect was how it's freed me up from carrying around my laptop bag, in many situations. Before July, I'd sling my laptop over my shoulder when I went just about anywhere, because I can't stand the thought of being caught somewhere without the ability to access the internet. I'd also bring it along whenever I expected to be sitting down and taking text notes.
The iPhone covers both these bases, so long as I'm willing to go without a keyboard - and for freewheeling note-taking, that's fine. Add in the fact that its camera makes its utility as a field-reporting tool even better than what I had before, and I find that I now only bring the lappie along if I expect to be doing some real sit-down work, like coding. Other than that, I quite frequently travel without my bag now, even to conferences and the like. That's a major, and unexpected, convenience.
(I also find myself using social apps like Facebook far more often now, since their iPhone integration is so nice, and it's fun to throw up cheesy phone-pics of whatever I'm doing as "status updates". Whether or not this is a real improvement in my life is not mine to judge. But it's fun.)
I've been an iPhone user for three months now. Before I bought it, I imagined it would act as a convergence of my iPod and my cell phone, meaning one fewer thing stuffed in my pocket.
What I didn't expect was how it's freed me up from carrying around my laptop bag, in many situations. Before July, I'd sling my laptop over my shoulder when I went just about anywhere, because I can't stand the thought of being caught somewhere without the ability to access the internet. I'd also bring it along whenever I expected to be sitting down and taking text notes.
The iPhone covers both these bases, so long as I'm willing to go without a keyboard - and for freewheeling note-taking, that's fine. Add in the fact that its camera makes its utility as a field-reporting tool even better than what I had before, and I find that I now only bring the lappie along if I expect to be doing some real sit-down work, like coding. Other than that, I quite frequently travel without my bag now, even to conferences and the like. That's a major, and unexpected, convenience.
(I also find myself using social apps like Facebook far more often now, since their iPhone integration is so nice, and it's fun to throw up cheesy phone-pics of whatever I'm doing as "status updates". Whether or not this is a real improvement in my life is not mine to judge. But it's fun.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 05:00 am (UTC)Over the years numerous products have come out and claimed to be useful but in reality they turned out to be 'more trouble than they're worth'. These include things like those little Casio Digital Diaries. You could store stuff in them but when the batteries died -- poof. No way to back it up.
I also have a PalmPilot which is almost useful -- especially since I CAN back up the data to a computer when the batteries die or when the thing crashes and has to be reset. Still, I can store things like names, email addresses and phone numbers in it but when I need to use a phone number I have to go to another device (cell phone) to actually make the call -- and that phone can itself store names and phone numbers (just like my email program can store email addresses). In that regard PalmPilots fail to truly be useful.
But now comes the iPhone. I'm wondering if this has finally broken the 'too useful to overcome the inconveniences' barrier. I've only demoed the iPhone once at our local Apple store and the one feature I didn't like was the goofy keyboard for texting (meant for babyhands). I'm also not sure if it is worth the price. I know it's gotten cheaper as of late but just how bad is the monthly cost these days?