Me and My iPhone, My iPhone and Me.
I have an iPhone, and a have found it to be nearly perfect. I had held out as long as I could, but it is the perfect storm of handheld consumer electronics. Sure, there are others out there with better features, faster connections and better service providers but no other device pulls it all together like the iPhone. IMAP for my Gmail (I don’t have all of my personal accounts on the iPhone as it chews up too much bandwidth. Yes, I have that many.) and for my work email (Exchange IMAP works just fine, people!). The latest updates make the Map.app even more useful with GPS-like wifi trilateration. Hahlo for my Twitter and NewsGator’s mobile site to sync with NetNewsWire (All of NewsGator’s personal products including NetNewsWire and their service are now free! I was willing to pay for it, and did, but this is even better! Get it!) to get my RSS. As a Mac user, no other device will even sync properly without the use of third party software like missing sync! I even get my iPhoto pics on my iPhone, smartly scaled down for its screen to take up less space.
It even has its own reality distortion field built in! Undecideds and nay-sayers play with for 30 seconds and clench their jaws with envy.
Mind you, my cell phone is worth more than the car I drive to work in. (It’s cheaper to keep it than to get rid of it.) I did sacrifice to get it. I am now chained for the next year and nine months to an uncaring, evil service provider that snoops on my connection for the government and would like to filter it for the entertainment industry.
But, there are times when it is well worth its pound of flesh and I have been know to not pull my laptop from its bag in the evening (gasp!) in favor of the iPhone for couch browsing. Even my beloved Wii couldn’t do that for me…
As and aside to John, Leopard is mostly great. Especially Time Machine. I’ve been using it since day one and it just works. (Although beware of large oft changed files such as Microsoft Entourage email database files and Parallels virtual disks. Exclude them and use a less frequent backup system for those types of files. Also, get a really big hard drive for backup.)
I know I sound like a cheerleader but Apple and the small developers who congregate around them make the best products around. I just don’t see the quality on the windows side. (Why can’t windows work as nicely as an Xbox 360? It boggles my mind.)