Ak-cherly ah, the first mobile phone I ever bought without a sticky-outy antenna was an Audiovox, some time in 1997. It looked like a remote control and I remember it started acting up after about a year, which led me to buy my first Nokia (a 3110, I think) and the rest is Finnish history (except for one short-lived foray into Sony Ericsson territory and my geeky purchase of the HTC StarTrek / Dopod S300).
Blue countryside silos
My Nokia smartphone certainly doesn’t have reception issues, and I do hold it ‘that way’. I wish Apple would just admit that the iPhone 4′s supposedly amazing design has a flaw. But I suppose they don’t have to, since their target is the consumer whose only interest is having the latest (but not necessarily greatest) thing and is happy to replace everything within six to 12 months.
Picking and twanging
I’m now the ‘guardian’ of the office iPad. Wow, it sure is one heavy mofo.
You have GOT to be fucking kidding me
In order to take a photo using your iPad, you must buy two apps and link up your iPhone 3GS to your iPad. Or you could use your camera / phone camera to take a photo and not look like a complete idiot.
Contortions in tune
My colleague, on hearing that I’ve made an appointment to get my wisdom teeth out, advised me to ‘bring my iPod’. She said having her iPod on and playing allowed her to distract herself when she got her braces removed.
When I got my braces removed, MP3s weren’t even a format yet. Oh, how old I am!
(I don’t have an iPod, in any case. I still use a trusty teeny tiny Creative Zen Stone that does the job perfectly well.)
Rays cutting off vision
On to “Photos,” where our iPad user is a woman. She, of course, immediately sits down on the couch and puts her feet up. The photos show good-looking friends, adorable children holding umbrellas in Paris, and the like. Thanks to the iPad, we can have the novel experience of holding our pictures “right in our hands.” Uh, thanks. Haven’t done that before.
Oh, and Best. iPad. Description. Ever:
One melancholy thought occurs as my fingers glide and flow over the surface of this astonishing object: Douglas Adams is not alive to see the closest thing to his Hitchhiker’s Guide that humankind has yet devised.
And Cory Doctorow is my hero:
The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”
The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.
I’ve also eaten an entire tube of Smarties. Happy easter.
So not awesome
The way to save magazine publishing is to publish them to the iPad, making magazines more expensive to produce? I’m betting people won’t be paying any more for a new or renewal subscription once these are widely available. It’ll be interesting to see if this actually happens and turns a significant and worthwhile profit.
Looking back and ahead again
Went to the Diane Arbus exhibition at the Dean Gallery on the weekend. I managed to actually go to something on opening day, an impressive performance by my standards. The price was right (read: free) — amazing photos, nicely displayed. The Dean Cemetery is also right next door to the gallery, so we took a walk round that, too (Me: Can we go into the cemetery after we’re done with the gallery? Neil: Only if we get to leave it.)
I wish I was better at taking photos. I’ve been lusting after a couple of things: the Diana Mini (I’m in love with the shutter lever) and one of those Lumix point-and-shoot dealies with the larger lens.