Posted by
Ed Lilly on Monday, June 15, 2009 10:32:34 PM
My lovely wife and I went to see “You’ve Got Mail” not long before we became engaged. Perhaps surprisingly for me, I’m not going to go off on a rant about how annoyed I am by the grammar of the title, and AOL’s ubiquitous marketing of the phrase that became the title of the film [What was that about not going off on a rant? - ed. Ok, Ok]. No, what makes me think of that movie is the completion of a wonderful birthday present Christine gave me: an iPhone.
With the Apple world-wide developer’s conference still several weeks away at my birthday, and the question of whether a new iPhone would be announced at that time, Christine asked if I wanted to get an iPhone like hers, or wait to see what the conference announcements brought. Having waited this long, I thought it wise to see if there was something newer I thought I really had to have before taking the plunge.
With the unveiling of the new, faster iPhone and the new pricing structure, we next had to figure out what it meant for us as somewhat recent converts to AT&T on Christine’s birthday last October, when she received her iPhone. The bad news, such as it was, meant that we could upgrade my phone, but we would not get the promotional / subsidized price. Thus, we would have to pay full freight on any new iPhone.
A quick review of the commentary and discussion online of the differences between the new and old versions, as well as our own experience over the past 9 months with Christine’s iPhone, convinced us that the smart choice was to pick up the iPhone already on the market and go with the upgraded operating system when it rolls out this week.
So how can I have now gone rambling on for four brief paragraphs about iPhones after saying that I was thinking about “You’ve Got Mail”? Well, the truth of the matter is, there is no small part of me that sympathizes a great deal with Frank Navasky, the character played by Greg Kinnear in the movie. In case you don’t remember, Navasky is Kathleen Kelly’s (Meg Ryan’s) boyfriend, a writer who is, in the words of Joe Fox’s (Tom Hanks’) girlfriend, “the greatest living authority on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” Navasky was also something of a technophobe, and we are told he wrote a newspaper column that was an ode to his electric typewriter (of which he had at least two of the same model, just in case).
So while I find myself very much impressed with the iPhone, its capabilities, and how very simple it is to use, there’s also a part of me that yearns to log onto eBay and buy an old bakelite telephone from the 40s with a rotary dial and hook it up. It’s solid, “people oriented” technology I can relate to. I’ve been “threatening” to do such a thing for several years, and quite frankly, the biggest thing stopping me from following through on it now is that I’m not entirely sure such a phone would work now that we have switched our phone service to Comcast digital.
I suppose a big part of why, despite my inner Luddite, I’m generally comfortable with the iPhone, as well as our iMac, is that the products just work. I spent almost six years telling Christine I was going to throw our Dell computer against the basement wall because I was so frustrated by its non-performance. We’ve now had the iMac two and a half years without so much as a hiccup.
And now, a little over a day into the iPhone experience, I’m very impressed and pleased. It’s well made, easy to use, and works wonderfully in tandem with the iMac in terms of synching everything from contacts to calendars to emails.
That said, if I happened to be surfing the App Store and saw that some like-minded, or like-souled, programmer managed to create a rotary dial screen that you could use as an alternative to the keypad in making calls on the iPhone, and it also made the clicking pulse sounds of a manually dialed telephone, I won’t deny my inner Navasky.
UPDATE - The beautiful Christine, upon reading this entry, immediately picked up her iPhone and found at least 5 rotary dial apps at the App Store. I think my favorite is, unsurprisingly, Bakelite. No muss, no fuss. I think Christine stopped rolling her eyes long enough to update her Facebook page to let people know the insanity she has to live with. Oh well, crosses to bear and all that.