I don’t think I’ve ever had an electronic device I’ve loved as much as my iPhone. Since the day I picked it up two years ago at the AT&T store in Oak Brook, IL it’s been a benevolent fixture in my life, rarely more than a few feet away. It’s probably had a bigger impact on my life (and, I suspect, on the lives of lots of other people) than any other product I’ve ever purchased:
- Twenty years’ worth of my favorite music, ripped & burned over the course of several Chicago Winter weekends, now accompanies me wherever I go.
- I still buy CDs sometimes, but not as much as I used to, thanks to Shazam, the greatest app ever written. Combine Shazam with XM or Sirius satelite radio (and a valid credit card!) and not only can you get all the music you will ever need, but you can also, at long last, finally know the lyrics to David Bowie’s Hang on to Yourself, without even pulling off the tollway.
- And then there’s podcasts. I’ve heard you can get these sans iPhone, but I’m a neo-neo Luddite so I’m not quite sure how, and I can’t imagine life without Mike Duncan’s amazing The History of Rome, so I think I’m about to find out.
So why did I just get an Adroid HTC EVO phone? Sadly, after all this time the iPhone still fails a basic mobile phone test: the can-you-have-an-important-business-phone-call-without-dropping test.I know it’s AT&T, not the device, but I guess I ended up needing a mobile phone that can hold a phone call. Go figure!
There’s a parable in here somewhere, something to do with yesterday’s monopoly AT&T now decrepit and inefficient enough to drive me to the brave new Google: too crafty to sign exclusives, too strong to need to, and too creepy for me to be happy about the switch.
Now if Sprint can hold my calls through the life of a conversation, and if I can figure out how to get The History of Rome on my EVO, I’ll be a happy camper.
