iPhonezorz!! Lolololol
Alrighty, so I was able to aquire for myself an iPhone 2g a couple weeks ago. While previously I’d been skeptical over the whole enchilada after a less than pleasing experience just after its launch, I have to say I am now very enamoured with the phone. It has matured very well in the hands of the hacker world and is getting close to being the best phone I’ve ever seen.
Sure, there are still some problems with it though. The “answer” and “decline” buttons when you get a call are backwards compared to any other phone, this first model can’t send or receive picture msgs (for no reason other than at&t bastards want you to “upgrade” to the new version that can), with no GPS it has to rely on the closest cell tower to get its location, the GUI is incredibly inconsistent on how to browse between pages depending on which app you’re running, the headphone jack is bastardingly proprietary, and the CPU could definitely be a bit faster for the strains I put on it.
But all that said, I don’t care! Whereas any one of those problems above would have caused me to scrap any previous phone, I am happily able to overlook the entire mass of shortcomings purely by what the phone actually can do. No longer do I need a seperate phone, MP3 player/PDA, camera, and laptop to get along with my mobile life. In this single device I can do everything I did before with all those previous ones without the massive bulk of having them in my pockets. So far I can use my phone as a phone, a really good snapshot camera (which is all I ever take anyway), an mp3 player, a web browser, a gameboy DS-like portable gaming device, calendar, dictionary, and email client. I’ve used it to entertain me for hours with movement-sensor-controlled katamari damasi, to consult emails of bank account information while doing wire transfers at my bank, to watch youtube in the car on long trips, to check movie times, etc. etc. And the best part is these were the easy things, and the more software I aquire for it the more powerful it becomes.
And this gets down to the basic truth of the matter: dedicated devices are doomed to failure in my hands. I want the open flexibility of a full OS. I don’t want something stripped down to only do a couple things well because in time I’ll need and want more than the device can put out. We are finally getting to the point where even low-power technology has enough oomph to do all the daily tasks that we want technology to do for us 95% of the time. Now all that’s needed is the software to make it happen, and for that to work we need full operating systems on our electronics. Dispite its original proprietary nature, once it was cracked the iphone became exactly what I want: an open platform where I can add in any software I want to suit my ever-evolving needs.
Funny thing is, if google’s G1 phone didn’t have a rediculously bad keyboard I probably would have bought one of those months ago…