perfidy

At around 2:00 yesterday afternoon, I was Ralphie on Christmas morning discovering that he had not gotten an official Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle, but instead a Barrett M82A1M .50 cal semi-automatic rifle with the lengthened accessory rail, rear grip and monopod socket. And ten boxes of ammo and a range pass.

Why was I so happy?

Because I had gotten home and after some minor difficulties gotten my precious iPhone hooked up, activated, and synced.

Thanks to existing contractual obligations, the unreasoning greed of auto mechanics and the Federal government, and a wife who despite her manifold virtue was dubious of the clear and obvious need for my iPhone purchase I was not one of the geeks who waited in line on June 29th for an opening day iPhone. Instead, I was a geek who had to wait six weeks like a sucker, while review after glorious review only whetted my appetite and turned the screws on the rack of my anticipation.

But having it in my sweaty palms, I find (almost to my surprise, despite having actually wasted a lunch hour in a pilgrimage to the local Apple store to fondle one) that the iPhone actually does live up to the hype. It is literally and figuratively the Jesus phone.

I got the 8GB version, figuring that more is better in the storage department. I loaded up almost four hundred songs, a movie, three tv shows, a complete audio book college course on the Crusades, a hundred pics of the Buckethead clan – and I still have 4.3 GB left. Plenty of storage.

As for performance, playing with the iPhone I remembered a quote I read once from Jonathan Ives, the design guru at Apple – “when our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.” It is staggering, after witnessing the ease of use and careful attention to detail embodied in the iPhone, to realize that in decades of cell phone design evolution, no one had ever come within a country mile of getting it right until now. Other phones are sun-warmed piles of dung compared to the glory of this phone.

I had a decent phone – a Motorola Razr. I appreciated above all its slenderness – if I was going to carry around a phone all the time, I might as well have one that was unobtrusive. For dialing numbers and talking to people, it was certainly adequate. I could press and hold “2” to talk to Mrs. Buckethead. But if I needed to look up another number from my contacts, I was screwed. Can’t do but one thing at a time.

Adding contacts was nightmarish, typing on the tiny number pad and being prompted at each change. Using the internet was a painful and expensive joke. The only function other than talking that I used at all regularly was the calculator.

Now I realize that the Razr was not a smart phone. But friends of mine have had smart phones, and I’ve played with them, and they are pretty much just as user hostile as mine was – just user hostile over a broader range of functionality.

In the last 24 hours or so, I’ve:

• Watched a movie, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• Watched Aqua Teen Hunger Force (“Circus”) and the Soup.
• Gotten and replied to dozens of emails
• Talked to my mom
• Read many articles on the internets, including this one
• Listened to lots of Johnny Cash
• Consulted the weather in several cities
• Used the map function to locate stuff, and navigate there
• Set the timer for no good reason
• And, gotten Mrs. Buckethead angry for setting her personalized ringtone to “bark”

In any given 24 hour period in the last decade or so, I might have used a computer to accomplish most if not all of those tasks. But forty pounds of computer equipment does not travel well, and the wireless router in my office does not reach several miles to the nearest town – let alone fit comfortably in your pocket.

The stunning thing is that all of these tasks were accomplished gracefully, easily, even joyfully. I’ve found myself just switching between applications to watch the animations. I am a techwriter by trade, so it is perhaps disturbing to realize that this thing does not need a manual. It is that intuitive – nothing is arcane, obscure or clearly not designed to be used by humans.

Which makes you want to use all the various thingies and gadgets, because they are flat out fun to use. And so well designed, that even this website looks better on the iPhone than it does on a 24” monitor on my desk. (It also makes you crave more applications.) I knew how to access and use most of the applications on my Motorola phone, I just didn’t use them because it was entirely too much of a pain in the ass to actually use them.

All other phones are broken, and this one is not. And of the two major worries that many had – the keyboard and the battery life – I have no complaints on either score. I’m already getting pretty fast on the typing, and I’m just about to recharge it for the first time.

This is one kick ass, highly enslickened, gorgeous piece of technological gimcrackery. I recommend it highly.