A friend of mine recently wrote to me:
"I just spent 2 hours on the phone with Apple to get Outlook to sync calendars with my iPhone (still not done but I hope successful); now that will get you confused and wondering about your sanity for wanting that sexy phone..."
I wrote this response to her (then sensibly chose not to send it - no need to be rude!):
Ooooooh, an IPorn....:-) Sorry, silly "typo" - it does seem to me, though, that Apple products are essentially techporn. So sexy and cool - feeding our narcissism and absorption with superficial applications of technology. And the sleek, minimalist, modernist lines? I am sick of them. Give me some "good, old-fashioned" ornamentation.
I am not really a Luddite, but I have become decidely (or, at least, relatively) low-tech in my view on life. I have a cell phone, but it is just a phone - no camera, no MP3 player. I don't want a PDA, I don't want to stick things into my ears, I don't want to wall myself off from the world around me, escaping into a private space of infinite playlists, twits, and life-as-iPhone-app.
"Wow, I can blow into an iPhone and make it sound like a flute."
That is incredible, don't get me wrong. But really who cares? Or to put it a better way: is this really what we should be caring about these days?
Capitalism is Dead, Long Live the iPhone!
5 comments:
Hi Steven.
It is right indeed that we do not need all the gadget that are around.. nowadays is more like "look, i have this product, now i need to create a demand for it in order to sell it".
And just on my curiosity, which model is your mobile phone?
Cheers.
Danilo
Hmmm, what is it, what is it? Ah, a a Motorola V196s, which according to this website has the highest level of radiation:
http://tm-mynews.blogspot.com/2008/06/cell-phones-with-highest-radiation.html
Sure glad I don't use it much....
I bet your phone does just the right job! But now another thought comes across my mind:since you travel all around the world boarding on different planes on different airports sometimes even in the same week.. how do you keep your trip plan, boarding ref, sites where to hold your speeches?Laptop, agenda? Would it be easier to store all in a smartphone?
I use Outlook to manage my calendar, and then I mostly work hard to avoid having overly full daily schedules. That is, I am busy, but not busy in the sense of having lots of appointments and meetings. So before I go on a trip, I will print out a page or two of key information, and for the rest just work out of my laptop.
iPhone is an incredible time-sink and I see so many techies doing stupid stuff on it that makes them weep like little babies... Until the very last OS release it couldn't even handle some utterly basic functionalitiy like giving you call duration or sending an SMS to multiple recipients.
Anyway, last week I discovered a great source of entertainment. My relatively low-end Nokia can send "flash" messages, i.e. service messages... and when you send them to the iPhone
1) The message shows up straight away on the screen, without touching anything
2) It's not stored at all
3) The sender does not show up at all!!!
You can just image how much fun I had with all kind of techies and non-techies (like my CEO) and what kind of messages I was sending! >:)
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