My iPhone: The first 48 hours

Thanks in part to an overly generous anniversary gift, I bought an iPhone Tuesday afternoon.  The timing was a little funny: On the one hand, I wouldn’t have a ton of time to play with it on Tuesday or Wednesday (summer grades were due at 8am today); on the other hand, I had heard that Apple would be running out by the end of this week (which seems to have been more or less accurate).

Because I had a little bit of time between bringing it home on Tuesday and starting to use it more intensively today, some buyer’s remorse crept in.  I have never been a cell phone person.  We have cell phones, in part because of the boy, but, in reality, one or the other of us is reachable by a land line the vast majority of the time.  90% of the time, I don’t even have my cell phone with me.  And as long as I thought about the iPhone as a species of phone, I began to get a little itchy about it.

But if I have my phone with me less than 10% of the time, I *always* have an iPod with me.  And that was what really struck me today: It’s not that I got a new phone.  I got a new iPod, and my iPod also sees the wireless network at my house and on my campus.  And it makes calls.  So, when I took the Little Man to swimming lessons today, as always, I brought my iPod to pass the time.  But today, unlike previous days, I wrote an e-mail about the lesson for A.

And all of a sudden, all the “e-mail to add” functionality of sites I already use–like 30Boxes, rememberthemilk, and stikkit–became much more relevant than they’d ever been before.  That little shift in thinking–It’s my iPod, which is always with me–made a big difference.  I don’t care that there are other phones that theoretically do more–I wouldn’t carry them.  But this fun little device ought to help me with work-related organizational tasks in all sorts of unexpected ways.

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3 other points: 1) It’s pretty sturdy.  It got knocked out of my hand when I was holding it waist-high, and it fell onto concrete with nary a scratch.   2) While walking across campus today, I looked up a phone number in Safari (using the wireless connection) while listening to The Hold Steady.   When I touched the phone number, the phone dialed it,  automatically muting the music.  I got the information, ended the call, and I was right back in the middle of “How a Resurrection Really Feels.”  The ease of that sequence of events made me laugh with delight.  3) I’ve got man-sausage fingers, and the typing’s pretty easy.  I’ve not spent much time with the keyboard, but you pick it up pretty quickly.  (Although the auto-correct dictionary suggested “Ono” when I typed “kno” en route to “know.”  I mean, I know Jobs likes the Beatles, but . . . )