iPhone therefore I am

I finally succumbed to temptation and bought myself an Apple iPhone as an early Christmas present. I had been wanting to get a 3G phone for ages, but I didn’t want to sell out my open-source principles by going for a model with a proprietary OS (even if OS X is really just BSD with a custom GUI). Unfortunately the Google G1, when it finally arrived, turned out to be rubbish, and the Blackberry Storm wasn’t much better, so there was nothing for it but to swallow my pride and lock myself into the Apple universe.

I don’t feel too bad though, since it’s an undeniably smart bit of kit. I’m glad that I’m old enough to remember a time when there were no such things as mobile phones, let alone mobile phones with internet access and GPS, so I can fully appreciate just what an amazing piece of technology the iPhone is. I have all the accumulated knowledge of the human race right here in my pocket, and, even better, it can tell me where the nearest pizza restaurant is. Kids today take this sort of thing for granted, so I don’t know what it will take to impress them when they are in their forties – some kind of time-travel functionality probably, so that they can flash back to laugh at us old timers with our phone-boxes and rotary dials.

It’s some way off being perfect though. I had thought that getting a 3G phone would mean I could update this blog more frequently, using the WordPress iPhone app, but the virtual keyboard is much too fiddly for my fat fingers, making typing anything more than a few lines a chore, and the lack of a cut and paste function means that if I want to include hyperlinks I have to revert to good old pen and paper to note the address. Still, it’s good for random browsing during quiet moments, which, in theory at least, means I should come across more things to blog about, even if, like now, I have to go back to my desktop to actually write it up.

Having mobile internet access will probably mean that I spend less time in Second Life though. At the moment most of my visits occur when I have turned on my desktop on the pretext of looking at the weather forecast or some such thing, before logging into the grid for a quick run around, which usually turns into a multi-hour virtual realathon. Now I can get the same information with a couple of taps on my phone there is no way that I’ll be motivated to get off the couch in the evenings.