Everyone loves to hate Apple – everyone without an iPhone that is. When I got my 3GS a year ago, I was looking to buy myself a toy, not realizing how much I would use it. Now I can say hands down, this is the best piece of technology I have ever owned – (and my brother in law just said that about his iPad).
So go ahead and call me a fan boi if you want, but use an iPhone for a couple months and tell me I am still wrong. There are almost a quarter million apps for the iPhone – sure you say 90% are garbage, that still leaves 25,000 apps to choose from.
I love it when people complain about Apple being a closed system. 99% of these people don’t know what a line of code looks like. I do know what a line of code looks like, and I am happy that I can install apps on my phone without worrying about my iphone slowing down or getting a virus, and I can remove an app just as easily with no mess left over. Now think about how wary your IT guy gets when you start installing windows apps on you machine at work…
So why is my iPhone the best piece of tech ever? In my pocket I have:
- A somewhat decent camera and video camera
- A web browser
- A music and video player
- My email, calendar and contacts, all synced with Gmail
- My favourite Twitter apps (Twittelator) and Yammer
- My RSS Newsreader, synced to my Google reader account (Reeder)
- My blog software (WordPress)
- Facebook and LinkedIn
- A file share synced to the cloud, my home computer, and 2 work computers (DropBox)
- Notepad synced with the cloud (Evernote)
- Dictation software (Dragon dictation)
- A full turn by turn GPS Navigation system, or just Google Maps if I prefer
- A remote control that controls iTunes on my computer, streaming music to my home theater
- A babysitter (lots of great kids games and complete seasons of Diego and Dora for the kids)
- My grocery list synced with the cloud, and my wife’s iTouch (Grocery gadgets)
- And of course weather updates (WeatherEye)
And those are just the apps I use on a regular basis, the list could go on.
Oh yeah, it is a phone too… but I use Skype to make most of my calls, so my air time charges are pretty low.
What does your phone do?
I agree, iDevices are most of the times big big big masterpieces gadgets. I bought my iPhone like 10 months ago, and is so far the most used device in that time period.
Nice reasons you give in your post.
Greetings
It’s a nice toy, but 95% of the functionality is stuff that you just don’t need. When I think of iPhones I recall the adage about money not being able to buy happiness. Having a billion “apps” at your fingertips surely won’t make you happy or complete your life either. I hope that people consider that before they get in line… Or they might be disappointed.
@Jeff, hey it is just an electronic device, I never claimed it was the key to happiness. I simply claimed it does 16 things really well, that I find very useful on a day to day basis. And I never realized how useful it was until I bought one.
Yeah, iPhones are cool. The only reason I haven’t switched over is b/c I just can’t stand typing on a digital keypad. That one genius patent is keeping RIM alive. At the end of the day, I dont think RIM has the intellectual, leadership, and financial horsepower to compete with giants like apple and google’s android.