It all started a few months ago when I started using Twitter again – a habit I had managed to clear myself of. I found that increasingly I wanted to be connected to people. I found that for the first time I was in a position where after an hour long commute I needed to check my email to make sure I was going to the right meeting, that the venue hadn’t changed, or the agenda. In short I needed access to information and a lot of it.
January of last year I got an N95 as my mobile handset – a bunch of people did. And how smug and superior we felt to most people to be walking round with a phone that could connect over 3G, take stunning photos, tell you where you were and let you video-call someone. Even when the iPhone came out we poured scorn and mocked. And then… And then bad things started happening. This snazzy phone started dropping calls a little too often. It started crashing when trying to retrieve email. Suddenly the 5mb per month data allowance felt restrictively limiting. And don’t even get me started on the web browsing experience.
And so we come inevitably back to the iPhone. A device that I spent a long post mocking on this site when it was first unveiled in the UK. A device that I’m now holding in my hand writing this post on…
In my defence, it has matured significantly on the past 18 months since it was first announced. The glaring deficiencies – the lack of both 3G and GPS – have both been addressed. Battery life still seems problematic but no worse than my twelve month old Nokia which admittedly had a hard life. The new version of the OS has been announced and will remedy a lot of the concerns with Bluetooth. The majority of the major sticking points have now been fixed and we’re finally able to talk about the iphone being a serious device. So I waited until my Nokia was really getting to me and then I gave in. I’ve had my iPhone for not quite a week and it’s already changing the way I interact with the world – I’m sat here in bed typing this for a start, and I’ll be able to save it, review it and publish it, all without going near an actual computer. I’ve interrupted typing this to check my email and Twitter twice and before I go to sleep I’ll probably read the news headlines. I’m able to get the information I want whenever I want it delivered right into my hand.
Don’t get me wrong – I stand by everything I said 18 months ago, but I didn’t take onto account Apple’s track record for releasing a crappy version of something and improving it. Or maybe I just drank the kool-aid finally…