I’m bewildered by all the bad press the iPhone 4 has been getting lately. Holding the phone in a certain way means that you get less reception? Less bars? It means absolutely nothing to me and I doubt that many iPhone owners give a damn either. Apple is offering a full refund to iPhone 4 owners who aren’t satisfied--let’s see how many people take them up on that offer.
I have never relied on my iPhone as a phone. Usually I can’t make or receive calls on it and if I have been lucky enough to get a connection, it cuts out right away. Once my wife and I were shopping in different parts of a store and she wanted to let me know she was ready to leave. So she called me. She would have had better luck tossing a paper airplane. When she finally found me and we left the store, she was pretty pissed off, but not as much as she was when my iPhone booped and told me I had received some calls. Using the iPhone’s amazing visual voice mail feature, I could listen to her calls in any order I wanted: for example, I could start with the angriest one first.
The iPhone does have email and it works serviceably. I’m sure that anybody who never owned a Blackberry would be very happy with it. But if you have had a Blackberry, the iPhone is a Ford and the Blackberry is a Lamborghini. My trained Blackberry thumbs could fly like the wind. I could type on my old Blackberry at a speed slightly slower than thought. Using my hunting and pecking skills on my iPhone, I am back to second grade, written communication-wise.
But I looooooove my iPhone. Next to my musical instruments computer and TV set, it is the object I get the most use out of and enjoy the most. To my mind it’s one of the most amazing devices ever invented. It tells me the weather, it helps me from getting lost, gives me news, information about movies, reminds me when I have appointments, records interviews, plays me music through Pandora when I’m exercising, takes excellent photos and videos, among of course, tens of thousands of other things. Of course I could probably get everything I need on an Android, but that would mean that people could reach me on my cell and I’d never get any peace.
With my iPhone I can go shopping any time I want and not spend a penny. There are tons of games and apps of all sorts that are free. And as soon as I “buy” something, Apple sends me a receipt so I will remember about the nothing I just spent. This makes me feel really good—like I got away with something. I keep all of these receipts in a special folder so I can budget for more free purchases in the future.
My iPhone is so pretty that it makes me happy just to look at it, something I do often. I am so moony over it that my wife gets jealous sometimes, so I buy another fart application so she will recognize that there is something for her in it too. My iPhone reminds me of the vintage Rickenbacker bass guitar I once owned. I never played it much, as I have never liked the raspy way a Rick bass sounds. But I got a lot of pleasure just opening the case. Oh God, it was a great looking guitar! And after I finally sold it, I got much more than I paid for it. Likewise, I sold my iPhone 3G on eBay last week and got $190 for the phone I paid $199 two years ago for. Not as good a deal as the Rick, but still pretty sweet.
Anyway, as I said before, all this talk about bars disappearing when you hold the phone a certain way flummoxes me. Bars? I don’t need no stinkin’ bars! I swear to God I never looked at the damned bars until everybody started making such a to-do about them.
In some places I have read that the iPhone 4 is better phone than my old 3G, as long as you hold it properly. A case too. People should stop whining and get a damned case! One tech blogger said that he had used his for three hours, something he had never done since the first one went on sale. And I admit that I got a call from somebody at a doctor’s office when I was at my podiatrist this week. I thought it was one of the alter kockers who worked there. They had been extremely confused about my appointment, so I thought they might have been calling me from the other room to confirm. But it turned out it was a receptionist from a gynecologist’s office. I was able to stay on the line long enough to tell her I was a man. She wanted to know if that meant I wanted to cancel, but eventually we sorted it out. Mission accomplished! So maybe I shouldn’t be so negative about my iPhone. Maybe I will start getting lots of calls. But at this point they will be limited to wrong numbers, until I build up my confidence.
Still I am happy about this whole “losing bars” deal. Because of the phone’s antenna issues, Steve Jobs is going to send me a “Bumper,” a piece of colored plastic that costs him a nickel and he was selling for $30. More free stuff! Not only that, I get to choose the color.
After I get my Bumper, I hope Steve sends me a nice receipt.
