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 . . . )
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